12 Jun Wireless Monitoring Feasible Both Before and After Surgery
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Sun
Virginia Sun, RN, PhD
Assistant Professor
Division of Nursing Research and Education
Department of Population Sciences
Cancer Control and Population Sciences Program
City of Hope Duarte, CA 91010
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Surgery is one of the most effective and important treatment strategies for cancer. Surgical procedures are by definition invasive, and patients are at risk for unpleasant symptoms, impaired functional status, and poor quality of life. Traditionally, mortality has been the sole measure to assess the risk of most surgical procedures. However, as surgical mortality has sharply declined, focus has shifted toward other endpoints, including patient-centered outcomes. There are critical gaps to assessing and integrating patient-centered outcomes into the surgical oncology workflow.
We conducted this proof-of-concept study to assess the feasibility and acceptability of a wireless monitoring approach for patient-centered outcomes before and after a major abdominal cancer surgery.
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings?
Response: Our findings suggest that a wireless approach for monitoring both subjective and objective measures of functional recovery, symptoms, and quality of life was feasible and acceptable before and after surgery. Leveraging technology with wearable devices and electronic patient-reported outcomes provides the opportunity to access these data efficiently and in real-time. This could potentially allow for timely management of postoperative issues that deviates from the anticipated recovery course
MedicalResearch.com: What should readers take away from your report?
Response: As value-based healthcare becomes more and more important, it is critical to develop and design novel, efficient, and scalable methods of integrating the patient’s perspective into cancer surgical care.
MedicalResearch.com: What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this study?
Response: Future research should examine ways to transform patient-reported outcomes and patient-generated health data into actionable patient care. In other words, can this data help with improving the quality of care? Will it help surgeons in making decisions on clinical care? Can patient-centered outcomes augment traditional surgical risk prediction tools? How we can feed the data back to patients to empower them to take a more active role in their postoperative recovery?
MedicalResearch.com: Is there anything else you would like to add?
Response: The wireless approach is simply a means of communicating and obtaining data; it is the interventions resulting from the data monitoring that will ultimately improve care for our patients. We would like to acknowledge the City of Hope Cancer Center Support Grant supported by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health (P30CA33572) for funding support.
MedicalResearch.com: Thank you for your contribution to the MedicalResearch.com community.
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Last Updated on June 12, 2017 by Marie Benz MD FAAD