Award given for “Monitoring Electronic Patient-Reported Outcomes During Cancer Treatment”
The University of Florida has been awarded one of the nine nationwide implementation projects to determine the success of self-monitoring by cancer patients. The nearly $500,000 award from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute will support an implementation project from 2025 to 2029 to understand the patient experience at UF Health.
Cancer patients who wish to communicate more frequently with their providers may have a solution in online, electronic patient-reported outcomes. Using the system MyUFHealth, formerly known as MyChart, patients will be able to share symptoms as soon as they experience them.
“Sometimes a patient may not think a symptom is troublesome, but the clinician knows it could lead to something bad,” said Jennifer LeLaurin, Ph.D., one of the project’s main researchers and an assistant professor in UF’s Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics.
Giving patients a voice
LeLaurin explained that prior PCORI-funded research found that routinely monitoring patient-reported symptoms reduced visits to the emergency room and hospitalizations. This new implementation project, titled Monitoring Electronic Patient-Reported Outcomes During Cancer Treatment, will evaluate the implementation of a similar electronic symptom monitoring system at UF Health and UF Health Jacksonville oncology clinics.
The implementation project is the third for UF after it was selected in 2023 for the Health Systems Implementation Initiative of the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute. The first, completed project helped UF Health upgrade its capacity for leadership in research, and the second, ongoing project is addressing the proper prescription of antibiotics to children with respiratory disease. Doctors and nurse practitioners are improving patient care by prescribing the best antibiotics for children with ear, nose and throat infections and only when needed.
Other University of Florida researchers in the newest study include Ramzi Salloum, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics (HOBI), Jacqueline De La Cruz, a research manager in HOBI, and Ji-Hyun Lee, Ph.D., a professor in biostatistics. Other key contributors are the UF Health Cancer Center, citizen scientists, social workers, and clinical teams.
LeLaurin noted that a related pilot project with nurses had trouble with a lack of automation that made it too time consuming. The first year of the new project will address these concerns and attempt to make the feedback system fluid and ultimately neutral to provider workloads.
This funding award has been approved pending completion of PCORI’s business and programmatic review and issuance of a formal award contract. PCORI is a nonprofit organization with a mission to fund research that will provide patients, their caregivers and clinicians with the evidence-based information needed to make better-informed healthcare decisions.