Supporting Clinical Practice Decisions With Real-Time Patient-Reported Outcomes

Obtaining symptom information from patients is fundamental in cancer care decision making. Improvements in symptoms often indicate a therapy is working, whereas worsening symptoms may reflect disease progression or an adverse event. Clinical decisions, for example, a treatment change (eg, reduction of chemotherapy dose for fatigue), beginning a supportive therapy (eg, providing an antiemetic for nausea), triaging for additional medical services (eg, psychosocial care), or additional evaluation of a complaint (eg, imaging a patient with abdominal pain postoperatively) may be made on the basis of patient-reported data. How do we currently obtain symptom information from pa-tients in clinical practice? This information is either elicited from patients at visits as part of a review of symptoms, or patients must remember to tell us because we do not ask, or patients must call betweenvisitswithparticularlybothersomeorworrisomecomplaints.