Electronic patient-reported outcomes as digital therapeutics for patients with cancer: a narrative review of current practices and future directions.

Abstract

Improved cancer treatment outcomes have increased the demand for medical care that considers the quality of life of patients with cancer. Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) help assess the quality of life because they involve direct evaluation of the patients. Recently, electronic PROs (ePROs) have been used in clinical cancer care settings in Europe and the United States. Electronic PROs positively affected communication between patients with cancer and healthcare providers, enhanced education, optimized self-management, contributed to healthcare economics, assisted in monitoring adverse events, and improved prognosis. However, challenges such as adherence, burden on healthcare providers, lack of personalized formats, low digital literacy, and implementation costs remain. Therefore, carefully selecting the items to be recorded by ePROs in alignment with specific objectives is essential. Additionally, developing systems using lifelogs-digital records of daily activities-and creating mechanisms that automatically encourage patient behavioral changes based on the reported data are crucial. This review delineates the advantages and challenges of ePROs according to their history and proposes the prospects of ePRO.