Go PRO in Cancer Care
The prevalence of chronic diseases, such as cancer, CVD, and diabetes, has increased significantly over the last few decades. According to UICC, globally, 1 in 5 people develop cancer during their lifetime, and 1 in 8 men and 1 in 11 women die from the disease. These new estimates suggest that more than 50 million people are living within five years of a past cancer diagnosis.
Elaboration of effective methods of diagnosis, treatment and prevention of cancer is an evolving challenge for modern healthcare leaders. After witnessing my father's journey through cancer treatment, I made the decision to seek a career where I could influence cancer care positively through consulting and software to expand the care planning tools to assist cancer patients and their families in understanding complicated treatment concepts and in making treatment choices that are in line with their goals of care. What gives me optimism is the fact that the cancer survivor population is expected to grow by 30% over the next decade. To deliver high-quality care, it is crucial to make sure that the patient's voice is consistently taken into account in all areas of oncology healthcare.
Patients provide a unique perspective on treatment effectiveness
Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) are standardized measures that are used to obtain the patient’s perspective and are increasingly used in all aspects of health care to ensure optimal delivery of patient-centred care. PROs can improve physician-patient communication, patient quality of life, and survival; they can also be used in oncology toward designing clinical trials, for FDA drug approval and label claims, comparative effectiveness research, and to improve clinical care. By capturing perceptions of how a patient feels or behaves in relation to their health or condition, PRO instruments offer a way to quantify the advantages of treatment. When using PRO tools, concepts, events, behaviours, or sensations can either be easily observed and verified (eg walking) or they might be non-observable, known only to the patient, and difficult to verify (eg feeling depressed).
The FDA intends to review the comparability of data obtained when using multiple modes of administration to determine whether the pooling of results from the multiple modes is appropriate. Modes of administration include interview, paper-based, electronic, Web-based, and interactive voice response formats. However, the infrastructure required for implementation and the lack of consensus on PROs are major barriers to its use at the current time.
Too often, we think narrowly about integration, viewing it only in technical terms: making sure that one system can talk to another system, or this data can commingle with that data. That's certainly part of it, but it must be far more than that. An indispensable key to success is that healthcare organizations employ integration as a defining strategic pillar of their modernization approach. Digital transformation is not just about paradigm deepening or doing what you’ve always done but with fancier tech. There should be no digital first and physical second, or physical first and digital second mindset. The mindset must be centred on meeting the end customer where they want to be met.
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Digitalization must be seen as a business model innovation rather than technology-related change.
Oncology Times has previously reported its findings on a Web-Based System for Self-Reporting Symptoms helping patients live longer through a randomized clinical trial of 766 patients. The clinical trial shows that a simple intervention—a web-based tool that enables patients to report their symptoms in real-time, triggering alerts to clinicians—can have major benefits, including longer survival. Patients with metastatic cancer who used the tool to regularly report symptoms while receiving chemotherapy lived a median of five months longer than those who did not use the tool.
The U.S. National Cancer Policy Forum claims that providing the appropriate treatment to the suitable patient at the opportune moment is an indication of excellent cancer care. The risk and results of specific events in the course of cancer, such as readmission, recurring oncology, treatment response rate, drug toxicity, and mortality, can be predicted using AI by tech businesses. The combination of varied clinical data with further AI processing is a viable approach to enhancing cancer care. Business executives, all too familiar with AI, metaverse, blockchain and quantum computing often talk of the hype cycle’s “valley of tears”. If we are to embrace digital transformation, we must look at changes in products and processes more than changes in technology. Digitalization must be seen as a business model innovation rather than a technology-related change. The task of transformation, even in the best of circumstances, is complex and fraught with risk.
With customer experience and satisfaction becoming more critical for engagement, there will be an increasing equivalence between medical, commercial and market access budgets, with an integrated brand and customer journeys; in short, the trend is shifting towards a positive customer outcome rather than volumetric input.
As an example, an interesting pattern I noticed by reading various personal stories posted on the Cancer Survival Network is that often in the comment section cancer survivors advise others to 'advocate for yourself with your doctors'. Below I shared a patient story diagnosed with breast cancer, I would strongly recommend reading achamp's story as tomorrow it could be you or I in her shoes, with the same experience. IDC accounts for 80% of all breast cancer diagnoses.
The value that pharma can bring, is to meet the patient, payers and providers where they are most active. We ought to map the current business model and augment engagement to the preferred channel and involve the end consumer early on.
Here are some tips on how we can address some of the current challenges in cancer care:
To genuinely alter the care model, iterations in the cycle of transformation, trust-building, and time are required. I have high hopes that the shift in the pharmaceutical industry toward a more balanced digital mentality and the effective use of data will begin to produce dramatic effects by 2025.