There is increasing recognition of the importance of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) for assessment of health-related quality of life in both research and clinical settings. PROs are especially important for inherently subjective but crucial clinical phenomena such as pain, mood, and fatigue. PROs can also provide valid assessments of health where performance-based objective measures are possible, but cost prohibitive or complicated (e.g., physical function and medication adherence). Despite much research on PROs, concerns about reliability and validity persist, especially when used at the individual level, particularly among patients who may struggle to understand PRO questions, such as those with low health literacy.
We are developing a smartphone-based system that administers PROs over time to cancer patients at home using a conversational agent on their smartphones, and the ability to display collected data to patients and clinicians using novel data visualizations. The system will be evaluated in clinical trials with two different populations of cancer patients.
This work is supported by the National Cancer Institute, and is a collaboration with Michael Paasche-Orlow (Tufts Medical Center), Jamie Griffith (Northwestern University), Kimberly Mack (Boston Medical Center), Enrico Bertini (Northeastern University), and Heather Gold (NYU School of Medicine).