Improving Cancer Treatment with Proactive, Digital Symptom Management

To foster proactive symptom management and improve cancer treatment outcomes, six health systems formed the Symptom Management Implementation of Patient Reported Outcomes in Oncology (SIMPRO) research consortium. SIMPRO received funding through the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Moonshot initiative to design eSyM, an electronic symptom management tool in Epic that makes communicating, assessing, and managing electronic PROs (ePROs) a more natural part of cancer treatment and recovery for both patients and clinicians. As of December 2021, more than 5,600 unique patients completed more than 42,000 questionnaires.

How They Did It:

• Enabled patients to report cancer treatment, post-operative symptoms through MyChart
• Notified care teams when patients experienced symptoms that required follow-up
• Helped clinicians integrate symptom review, documentation into their usual workflows
• Created a MyChart page with education, views of reported symptoms
• Developed a dashboard to track, manage patients with severe symptoms

Read the full article on EpicShare.org.