Remote Monitoring May Improve Recovery After Cancer Surgery

Remote monitoring before and after surgery has been found by researchers to be associated with improved recovery for patients with cancer.

Study results, detailed in a news release issued by the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and published in npj Digital Medicine, shows that patients who worse wristband accelerometers and reported symptoms via a mobile app before surgery and at regular intervals after discharge saw a 6% greater functional recovery rate by two weeks after surgery and fewer major complications compared to patients who received only automated messages. Additionally, patients reported improved symptom management and less interference with daily activities.

The randomized trial compared remote perioperative monitoring to the standard of care in 293 patients who underwent major abdominal or pelvic surgeries for gastrointestinal, genitourinary or gynecologic cancers.

CURE spoke with co-author Tracy Crane about the findings. Crane, who holds a doctorate degree, is co-leader of the Cancer Control Program at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of the University of Miami School of Medicine.

Transcript

What were you and your colleagues hoping to learn with this study?

More and more cancer care is moving out of the four walls of a cancer center, and especially in the postoperative setting, for patients who are faced with things such as a GI surgery for cancer or gynecologic cancer or even genitourinary or prostate cancer, we want to make sure that we can get our patients healing faster and healing better. And one of the things that we wanted to know was, could we implement some sort of remote-based monitoring, because more patients are at home? How could we better monitor patients such that their postoperative outcomes improved? I have an Oura ring on and a Fitbit on, and all these gadgets that we assume are going to make life better, but could they really be used in such a way to help with remote monitoring? So that was really the question that we wanted to answer in the postoperative setting. And if so, how could we best implement this?

There were two arms of the trial. One arm of the trial had your standard monitoring postoperatively that you would get, so everybody got at least standard of care, of course. The other arm was also completing symptom journals online, like they're monitoring their symptoms, daily reporting on their symptoms, and they also had a device that was tracking their activity. So in the arm that was getting the remote patient monitoring if they dropped below a certain level of daily activity in addition to the symptoms, the nurses were alerted in that arm, so they were then informed that your patient appears to also be having lower levels of activity.

And that, in fact, resulted in about a 6% improvement in faster recovery, fewer postoperative complications. Interestingly, this additional level of remote monitoring also helped people stay engaged in the trial, which I think is an interesting finding. We don't know if it's the additional level of surveillance that helped them feel like they were still part and being monitored by their health care team, but we did find that it did improve postoperative outcomes.

Reference

1. “Remote Monitoring Improves Recovery from Cancer Surgery,” news release; https://news.med.miami.edu/remote-monitoring-improves-recovery-from-cancer-surgery/

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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