Telehealth Strategy Tracks Health Risk Behaviors Among Cancer Patients

Following funding from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a telehealth strategy known as Northwestern’s Program for Scalable Telehealth Cancer Care (STELLAR) aims to track three health risk behaviors, smoking, obesity, and inactivity, among those diagnosed with cancer.

The increase in telehealth that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic provided valuable information to patients and physicians, mainly relating to its efficacy and accessibility. However, less is known about its efficacy for patients with certain conditions.

“Not surprisingly (to us), telehealth treatments have generally been effective and seem to have enabled underserved patients to access care more easily,” said Bonnie Spring, project leader, professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“Because it’s always tempting to regress back to old ways, we now need to establish a strong research evidence base about whether telehealth works for cancer care. That’s how to improve the standard of cancer care and to make it more equitable. And that’s what the four NCI Telehealth Cancer Research Centers of Excellence will do, and why they’re so important," continued Spring, who is also program co-lead for cancer prevention at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University and director of the Center for Behavior and Health at Feinberg. 

Behaviors commonly affecting outcomes among cancer patients include smoking, overeating, and a lack of physical exercise. Although there are existing strategies for standard treatment, researchers from Northwestern will look at whether telehealth produces similar outcomes.

Northwestern researchers recruited 3,000 participants from 11 Northwestern Medicine Hospitals to test STELLAR. They will engage in remote coaching via telehealth and track behaviors through an app.

This program will ideally be cost-effective, the researchers added. Currently, treating cancer patients who are obese or smoke adds $124.3 million to the annual cost of care. By employing non-clinician patient navigators—trained folks with a bachelor’s degree but who are not medical professionals—could be a cost-conscouis way to chip away at that expense.

Spring also mentioned that the system allows for easy organization, as providers can recognize outcomes and determine correlations based on what the patient tracked.

“This enables the team of care providers to encourage the patient to make healthy behavior changes,” said Spring. “It’s giving these doctors a service they all think is valuable, but they’ve not had time or reimbursement to offer it.”

Various conditions have benefitted from using apps to track patient activity and outcomes in the past.

A study from August 2022 reported that using a mobile app to treat diabetes patients was highly sufficient. After dividing patients into various groups, some of whom received care through usual methods and some through mobile solutions, researchers found that the mobile app could track HbA1c levels.

Another study from July 2022 found that a mobile app system was effective in detecting skin cancer. Researchers noticed that the app could capture and recognize threatening images and report information to providers.