SIMPRO Project to Use mHealth to Monitor Cancer Patients At Home

Six health systems are launching a remote patient monitoring program to collect patient-reported data through an mHealth platform. The goal is to improve care management and coordination for those in cancer treatment.

Coordinated by the National Cancer Institute and the Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot Initiative, the SIMPRO Research Center (Symptom Management IMplementation of Patient-Reported Outcomes in Oncology) will create an electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePRO) tool on the Epic electronic health record platform.

Connected health data will be collected through an mHealth app called eSyM.

Via the app, patients will relay data through the EHR to their care providers to track symptoms following cancer surgery or chemotherapy. Officials say the study will test whether a remote patient monitoring platform that combines data collection and coaching can improve care management and reduce hospitalizations and Emergency Room visits.

The six health systems involved in the program are the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center in Boston (the coordinating center), West Virginia’s WVU Cancer Institute, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, Maine Medical Center, the Lifespan Cancer Institute in Rhode Island and Baptist Memorial Health in Memphis.

“In a rural state like West Virginia, patients often travel great distances to come to Morgantown for their oncology care,” Hannah Hazard Jenkins, MD, a surgical oncologist at the WVU Cancer Institute and co-principal investigator on the project, said in a WVU Medicine press release. “Our goal is to have real-time reporting of symptoms by our patients, so we can treat their symptoms if they become worse over time.” 

“By having patients report symptoms in a timelier fashion, we can respond quicker and head off trips to the emergency room and even subsequent in-patient stays,” she added.