NEW YORK — As part of a larger initiative, a center will be established at New York University to determine how social factors might affect the delivery of telehealth for cancer care.
The Telehealth Research and Innovation for Veterans with Cancer (THRIVE) Telehealth Research Center will be led by NYU Grossman School of Medicine and will work closely with VHA. The social factors examined will race and ethnicity, poverty and rural residence.
With its veterans’ center, NYU is one of four academic institutions that will establish centers of excellence to conduct research on the role of telehealth in delivering cancer-related healthcare. The practice became much more common during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially at the VA, which already had 13 VAMCs delivering patient care through the National TeleOncology Program (NTO) as of the end of last year.
The new centers of excellence are funded with $23 million from the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health. NCI’s Telehealth Research Centers of Excellence (TRACE) initiative is receiving support from the Cancer Moonshot, a White House initiative first launched in 2016 and reestablished by President Joe Biden’s administration this year to accelerate the rate of progress against cancer. The awards are to be distributed over five years, pending availability of funds, according to a press release.
“One of the Cancer Moonshot goals is to make the cancer experience less burdensome for patients and their families and caregivers,” explained Katrina Goddard, PhD, director NCI’s Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS). “We are awarding these centers of excellence to better understand how telehealth can contribute to improved health outcomes across the cancer care continuum.”
Telehealth is defined as distant healthcare provided by clinicians using electronic means, such as by phone, email, text message or videoconference.
“These centers will address important gaps in telehealth and cancer-related care delivery,” pointed out Robin C. Vanderpool, Dr.PH., chief of the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch in DCCPS. “We need to establish an evidence base for using this technology to deliver healthcare in oncology and make it part of routine care. In addition, these centers will explore opportunities for scalability and dissemination of their cancer-related telehealth interventions beyond their own health systems.”
Other Centers
In addition to the veterans’ center, the three other centers include:
- The Scalable Telehealth Cancer Care (STELLAR) Center: Led by Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, this center will focus on using telehealth to extend health services to cancer survivors aimed at reducing risk behaviors such as smoking and physical inactivity.
- The University of Pennsylvania Telehealth Research Center of Excellence (Penn TRACE): Led by the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, this center will use communication science and behavioral economics to compare the effectiveness of multiple telehealth strategies on shared decision-making for lung cancer screening and to improve timely access to comprehensive molecular testing for advanced lung cancer.
- The Making Telehealth Delivery of Cancer Care at Home Effective and Safe (MATCHES) Telehealth Research Center: Led by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), New York City, this center will study the effectiveness of a remote monitoring system called MSK@Home for patients receiving systemic treatments for prostate and breast cancer.
Among the missions of the four centers is to focus on identifying and addressing telehealth-related disparities among vulnerable populations, including racial and ethnic groups, rural residents, older adults, people who are uninsured or low-income, people who are socially isolated and people who have limited digital literacy. Another goal is to train the next generation of telehealth-focused researchers.
“These centers will be at the cutting edge of some amazing breakthroughs by creating sustainable and effective telehealth options tailored specifically for cancer care,” said Roxanne E. Jensen, PhD, a program director in the Outcomes Research Branch in DCCPS who is overseeing the TRACE initiative with Vanderpool. “This work will pave the way for having healthcare delivery look a lot different for cancer patients over the next five to 10 years, and that’s really exciting and in alignment with the goals of the Cancer Moonshot initiative.”’