Electronic Patient-Reported Outcomes: The Time Is Ripe for Integration Into Patient Care and Clinical Research

In the emerging team-based approach to delivering cancer care, collecting patient-reported outcomes (PROs) provides longitudinal monitoring of treatment adverse effects, disease complications, functional statuses, and psychological states throughout the cancer continuum for all providers to use. Electronic systems offer added capabilities, including easy quantitation of individual symptom items and aggregated scales, standardization, and longitudinal tracking of patient surveys for trend analysis over time. An ideal electronic PRO (ePRO) platform is clinically relevant, validated, and reliable and would offer patient usability. Additionally, it should allow for automated responses to and from patients, have scheduling functionality, and send real-time alerts to site personnel and patients. Clinical interfaces should be easy to read and integrated into the electronic medical record. Multiple ePRO systems, often using electronic tablets, have been created and are beginning to be widely deployed. The Patient Care Monitor is one example of a system that has evolved into a comprehensive patient engagement platform, with a complete review of systems survey and capabilities for mobile health usage. Recent clinical trials have established ePRO systems as an effective method of providing information, which aids improved patient outcomes, including reduced health resource utilization and longer time on therapy. ePROs are also increasingly incorporated into clinical trials, where they can provide more thorough reporting of adverse events than can be captured by alternative methods. Mobile devices have the potential to become the method by which all members of the provider team communicate with patients both at the point-of-care and between clinic visits to optimize care delivery.