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Patient Engagement With Digital Health Tools in the Community Oncology Practice Setting
Debra Patt, MD, MPH, MBA, Texas Oncology, Dallas, TX, investigated utilization among patients with cancer who enrolled in a portfolio of digital health solutions (DHS), aiming to understand how utilization of oncology DHS may be limited among certain populations.
Transcript
My name is Dr Debra Patt, I'm an executive vice president of Texas Oncology, which is part of the US Oncology Network.
In a community oncology practice we constantly want to improve upon the quality of care delivery at each side of service. Because of that practices like Texas Oncology have begun to introduce digital healthcare solutions to the patients we serve. Texas Oncology has done that by implementing supportive care pathways that nurses interact with digitally, a digital patient portal, a mechanism to give digital patient education out to patients, and also an electronic patient reported outcomes tool to measure patient symptoms and symptom burden during active treatment for their cancer.
We evaluated a hundred thousand touches of digital healthcare solutions with the patients that we serve to better understand utilization characteristics. I think as we implement digital healthcare tools frequently people ask are these tools going to be useful in an older patient population? Are they going to be useful in patient populations that are more vulnerable? Are they going to be useful in patient populations who don't speak English as their first language? And so we evaluated utilization characteristics among these tools.
What we found is that among each and every population these tools were heavily utilized, even among older patients, even among racial and ethnic minorities, even among people that didn't speak English as their first language. I think what this tells us and what we can glean from this is that digital healthcare tools are really useful ways to enhance care delivery, and they're meaningful to patients as patients continue to use them.
I also think that as Texas Oncology is a large practice with 220 sites of service that's both rural and urban we frequently seek to understand how we can enhance care delivery and digital healthcare solutions are really a way in which we can do that.
Thank you so much for your attention today, it's a pleasure to share this information at ASCO and learn about how others continue to contribute to this field.
