Electronic Self-report Assessment--Cancer (ESRA-C): Working towards an integrated survey system

The Clinical Informatics Research Group and Biobehavioral Nursing and Health Systems at the University of Washington are working with interdisciplinary teams to improve patient care and tracking of patient-reported symptoms and outcomes by creating an extensible web-based survey and intervention platform. The findings and cumulative experience from these processes have led to incremental improvements and variations in each new implementation of the platform. This paper presents progress in the first year of a three-year NIH study entitled Electronic Self Report Assessment--Cancer (ESRA-C). The project's goals are to enhance and evaluate the web-based computerized patient self-reporting and assessment system at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. Preliminary work and lessons learned in the modification of the platform and enhancements to the system will be described.