Cancer Center to Use mHealth App to Support Timely Access to Care

Following the receipt of the Navigation Capacity-Building Initiative Grant from the American Cancer Society, Mays Cancer Center at UT Health San Antonio aims to support equitable and timely care for those battling cancer through the use of an mHealth application.

The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) includes five schools, a workforce of over 7,000 people, and a budget exceeding $1 billion. Its clinical practice conducts over 2 million patient visits per year.

The American Cancer Society, which aims to reduce cancer prevalence and supports policy changes and research to achieve its goal, provided $300,000 to Mays Cancer Center to enable enhanced patient navigation. The association believes that patient navigation is essential to addressing care barriers, according to the press release.

The grant will help fund Mays Cancer Center's use of an mHealth app to offer nutritional support and symptom management to those receiving anti-cancer treatment. Provided by a digital nutrition management and counseling service known as Agilix, the app will enable real-time patient outreach with individualized assistance through many different types of providers.

It will also provide patients access to registered nurses with oncology-specific clinical knowledge.

“The award of the American Cancer Society grant is to provide real-time medical nutrition therapy and symptom management by digital navigation and access to innovation in underserved cancer patients,” said Daruka Mahadevan, MD, PhD, chief of the Division of Hematology and Medical Oncology at UT Health San Antonio and associate director of clinical research at Mays Cancer Center, in a press release. “This we hope will lead to even better patient outcomes.”

Mahadevan also emphasized the goal of supporting patients who live far distances from the clinical location by sustaining individualized assistance while eliminating the need for certain visits, the press release states. Although some patients may only see an oncologist every two to three weeks, clinical issues often arise in between visits.

“So, if we can capture symptoms in real time, then we can prevent patient visits to the emergency department from happening,” said Mahadevan. “And if a patient is able to get their therapy on time and at the right dose, with appropriate nutritional treatment, chances of actually benefiting from treatment are much higher than if they couldn’t.”

Recently, the use of telehealth to improve cancer care has expanded. 

In August, funding from the National Cancer Institute led to the creation and implementation of a telehealth strategy known as the Program for Scalable Telehealth Cancer Care at Northwestern, which aims to track health risk behaviors such as smoking, obesity, and inactivity among cancer patients.

Researchers noted that aside from the ability to track these behaviors, the program provided various other benefits, including cost-effectiveness.

The same grant funding from the National Institutes of Health was also provided to organizations such as the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania, which used the funds to create their telehealth research centers of excellence that aim to improve cancer care.