Telehealth in home-based cancer pain management: a narrative review

Cancer pain, a common and debilitating symptom among patients with advanced malignancies, often necessitates sustained, individualized management that extends beyond the clinic. Home-based management is therefore a natural setting for continuous assessment and timely intervention. Traditional home-based pain management approaches serve various functions but fall short in terms of sufficient timeliness, intelligence and individualization. Recent advances in telehealth are reshaping this landscape by enabling proactive, individualized, and scalable support. In this context, this review was conducted to elucidate the recent progress on application of telehealth in home-based management of cancer pain, providing new insights and general principles for both providers and patients.

A comprehensive literature search was performed on PubMed, Cochrane Library, and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL). The search included randomized and non-randomized trials, cohort or pre-post studies, and systematic reviews that evaluated telehealth interventions aimed at home management of cancer pain. Search terms encompassed relevant keywords for cancer pain, home-based, pain management and telehealth.

Telehealth has empowered cancer pain management through remote symptom monitoring, real-time assessment, personalized intervention, smart pain management and provider-patient empowerment. It facilitates the identification and documentation of pain intensity fluctuations, improves patient-reported outcomes (PROs) and may reduce safety risks such as opioid overdose. Owing to its advantages in transcending time and space, telehealth has gained broad acceptance among both providers and patients. However, the successful implementation of telehealth in the home setting depends on seamless integration with multiple factors and support from different dimensions while overcoming numerous challenges and limitations. This may entail enormous efforts and consideration from different groups. Looking ahead, the greatest opportunities lie in artificial intelligence (AI) driven predictive analytics, systems or platforms to forecast pain fluctuations, personalize treatment and proactively reduce safety risks. Another promising direction is hybrid healthcare models that combine remote monitoring and in‑person interventions.

This narrative review combs through the promising empowerment of telehealth in the home-based cancer pain management, discussing its multifaceted benefits, characterizing current challenges and limitations while providing a general principle for future research and application directions in telehealth empowered home-based management of cancer pain.