As the costs and resourcing challenges of hospital-based cancer care continue to grow, Dr Toby Basey-Fisher, CEO & founder of data analytics and monitoring service Entia, explains why implementing robust home-based patient support programmes is a win-win for pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers and patients.
Dr Toby Basey-Fisher
The provision of effective, patient-centric cancer treatment is one of the defining challenges and opportunities of 21st century healthcare.
Cancer incidence is increasing in line with our ageing population. And while our scientific and medical understanding of cancer is growing all the time, delivering complex treatments while maintaining high standards of patient care is an uphill battle, made all the more difficult by escalating staff shortages and hospital capacity constraints.
The current status quo is already far from optimal. Too many cancer patients are made to travel long distances to receive care and forced to wait lengthy periods for appointments risk being kept on treatment programmes that aren't actually benefitting them, or that may be worsening their day-to-day quality of life.
As the pressure on our healthcare systems builds, there is an urgent and acute need for alternative solutions to prevent a decline in cancer care provision and patient outcomes. Hospital-based care is struggling to deliver – the question is whether it's possible to deliver a higher standard of care remotely to cancer patients in their homes?
The case for home monitoring and self-management
There's growing consensus amongst healthcare leaders and policymakers that cancer care could be more effectively administered through home monitoring; capturing ongoing patient data and delivering this to clinicians to inform better decision-making about treatments and support.
Regular data snapshots can provide an early warning of any issues related to a patient's cancer treatment, leading to more timely interventions and reducing the need for distressing, resource-intensive and time-consuming hospital admissions further down the line.
Gathering this depth of data would historically have required regular in-person patient assessment. However, improvements in technology – particularly in the wearables space – combined with better connectivity mean effective home monitoring is now a viable approach.
In this scenario, patients are central to their own care, reporting symptoms and providing regular readings without ever having to leave the comfort of their homes.
The challenge is how to deliver genuinely useful data to time-poor healthcare staff without befuddling them with complexity or increasing their workload. Get it right, and clinicians can free up significant time thanks to the reduced need for face-to-face appointments, while more quickly identifying patients who require immediate attention.
Data should dictate the future of cancer treatment
Already, cancer care providers have access to a wealth of patient information that – when combined with best-of-breed analytics technology – can reveal invaluable insights into treatment progress and outcomes. With enough data, healthcare providers can identify when complications occur and whether they're linked to specific treatments.
Adding regular real-time data updates from patients' homes to the mix could be a game-changer, helping clinicians to predict and prevent major events, keeping patients on treatments for longer and potentially improving survival rates.
The technology to capture this data exists today. Affordable wearables can record baseline health statistics across a wide range of metrics. Easy-to-use home blood testing solutions have been successfully trialled and can already be manufactured and deployed at scale. The results from these tests can be shared with healthcare professionals securely via the cloud and delivered through simple and intuitive dashboards.
When these tests are analysed alongside ongoing symptoms and vitals tracking, healthcare providers can gain a complete picture of a patient's health at every stage during cancer treatment, alerting clinicians to potential issues before they significantly impact quality of life.
Similarly, by combining this data with advances in genetic profiling, there is tremendous potential for a more tailored approach to cancer care, for example, personalised medication dosing, for optimal impact.
An open goal for pharmaceutical companies
Alongside the clear benefits for patients and clinicians, pharmaceutical companies also stand to benefit from the rich data insights delivered via remote patient monitoring.
Cancer drugs have come on leaps and bounds in recent years, but patient responses to therapies in the real world can be unpredictable and vary somewhat from those observed within the structured environment of clinical trials. When treatments don't go to plan, this can lead to interruptions in the treatment cycle, amounting to delays in orders and loss of sales. It can also damage wider patient and clinician confidence in the efficacy of a particular approach, ultimately translating into a loss of market share for the company behind the treatment.
More accurate patient data, delivered more regularly, can be the panacea the pharmaceutical industry craves. By giving companies a nuanced understanding of how patients respond to medications, prescribing information and guidelines could be adjusted to manage side effect risk, helping people to stay more effectively on their treatment for its recommended duration and reap the maximum benefits. These insights will also help to pave the way for the development of new and better therapies and the transformation of treatment pathways to deliver more preventative, personalised care.
And while patient outcomes should always be the pharmaceuticals industry's first priority, there can be little doubt that ongoing home monitoring, deployed alongside chemotherapy, is a potential market-mover for the companies that parse the data effectively and act on the insights delivered.
A new era of data-defined healthcare
In the short term, better home monitoring, combined with powerful predictive analytics, will empower healthcare providers to manage patients outside the hospital and provide more preventative models of care, streamlining clinical services and mitigating cancer therapy's most costly side effects.
In the long term, as the volume of patient data increases, healthtech innovators will be able to build and analyse unique datasets to enhance global understanding of cancer treatment, improving the clinical decision-making process and providing better support based on every individual patient's unique needs.
We're still in the early days of home monitoring for cancer care, but the evidence is clear. It is the pathway towards a future in which cancer care is seamlessly integrated into patients' daily lives, rather than the current, time-toxic experience frequently endured by millions of people. And it's a win-win scenario both for the healthcare providers responsible for providing care, and the pharmaceutical companies responsible for delivering life-saving treatments.