How the online reporting tool can help the cancer patients?

Reuters Health has been asking the cancer patients to annually report some signs online to help in the improvement of their life quality and to possibly boost their survival rate. This is according to the new study. The researchers have discovered that the patients using a website to report the signs had a better life quality, they were also less likely to be brought to the ER, confined much longer and they tend to survive much longer than those who were just monitored by their doctors in the hospital.  According to Dr. Ethan Basch, they were asking the people with some of the strange signs that we may see across the advanced cancers like vomiting, diarrhea, loss of energy, weight loss, sleep problems and others. Some things that are very common, subjective and usually missed.

The rates of the patients who went through monitoring online

The signs are also manageable, that means that the doctors and the health care providers can offer some treatments or even adjustments for the improvement according to Basch. His team writes in a Journal of Clinical Oncology that these patients reported result, standardized questionnaires had been a method to improve and control the signs; however, the researchers just did not know if the advantages outweigh the cost and the problem of using them.  For the current discovery, the researchers asked around 630 patients with the advanced cancers in a hospital in NYC to report twelve of the signs they have encountered using tablets that were given to them. The doctors even got the printouts of the sign surveys as soon as the patients came in for their next checkup and the nurses got emails if the patients reported server or worst signs of cancer. According to Basch, they know that from this study that the nurses took action 75% of the time when they got 1 of the email alerts.

There is another set of 227 patients with the advanced cancers getting the typical care that they ought to have, that includes the usual monitoring by the doctors. Those who have participated entered the study from September 2007 to January of 2011. They have spent an average of around 4 months joining in the study and had an average of 16 doctor visits in that particular time.  Over the study period, those who have answered the online surveys were more likely to see some of the improvements in their life quality compared to those in the usual care group.

The patients who answered the surveys were also not likely to report their deteriorating life quality. Around 1/3 of the patients who answered the survey ended up in the ER of the hospital, this is when compared to the 41% of the typical care group. Those who are using the sign reporting tool online also kept in the chemo much longer than those who never used it. Around 75% of those patients who answered the surveys were still alive after a year; this is when compared to the 69% of those included in the typical care group