Bridging New Technology Into Clinical Practice With Mobile Apps, Electronic Patient-Reported Outcomes, and Wearables

With sophisticated mobile and wearable technologies available, there has been interest in leveraging these devices to help gather and analyze patient-generated health data (PGHD). This information could be used to better address health concerns, aid in treatment decision-making, and guide interventional strategies to improve outcomes. Among PGHD, electronic patient-reported outcomes, direct reports of patient experience usually collected via validated scales and questionnaires, are increasingly integrated into routine clinical practice to monitor patient status. Electronic patient-reported outcomes have been shown to improve outcomes, including symptom control, quality of life, and overall survival, in several clinical trials. Electronic patient-reported outcome collection is now being implemented across broader clinical practice settings but with limited evaluation of impact thus far. Wearable devices and mobile apps provide opportunities to collect additional PGHD, including continuous physiologic measures, and to generate algorithms with which to monitor patients with cancer and guide interventions. In this article, we discuss several topics related to PGHD and technology, including electronic patient-reported outcomes, mobile apps, and wearable devices and how their introduction into oncology care has the potential to improve the collection and use of PGHD in the future. We also highlight the challenges and future directions needed for mobile and wearable technologies to provide meaningful information that can be acted upon and thus can improve oncologic care.