Four new academic centers will be established by the National Cancer Institute to study how ... [+]
The National Institute of Health (NIH) has announced that the National Cancer Institute (NCI) is awarding $23 million in grant support to four academic institutions that will conduct research on the role of telehealth in delivering cancer-related health care.
The awards will be used to establish four Telehealth Research Centers of Excellence (TRACE), an initiative that’s part of the Cancer MoonshotSM, a White House concept launched in 2016 and supported by President Biden in 2022. The goals of the Cancer Moonshot include reducing the death rate from cancer by at least 50% over the next 25 years and improving the experience of people and their families living with and surviving cancer.
“One of the Cancer Moonshot goals is to make the cancer experience less burdensome for patients and their families and caregivers,” said Katrina Goddard, Ph.D., director of NCI’s Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS), in the agency’s news release. “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 health care that’s provided by health care professionals from a distance using any of a variety of communication technologies, including phone, email, text message, or video conference. The use of telehealth increased substantially during the pandemic, but how it can best be deployed for cancer care remains to be empirically investigated.
The four centers will study how telehealth can be used in a range of interventions - from prevention to screening, diagnosis to treatment, and survivorship. According to the announcement, each center “will be led by an academic institution that has assembled diverse teams of researchers to conduct large trials in real-world clinical settings such as hospitals, cancer centers, oncology practices, and primary care offices.”
The awards will be spread over five years, pending the availability of funds. Here are the four recipients:
- The Telehealth Research and Innovation for Veterans with Cancer (THRIVE) Telehealth Research Center. Led by the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, this center will work with the Veterans Health Administration to learn how social factors such as race and ethnicity, poverty, and rural residence affect the use of telehealth for cancer care.
- The Scalable Telehealth Cancer Care (STELLAR) Center. Led by Northwestern University, this center will focus on using telehealth to help cancer survivors reduce various 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, this center will use discoveries in communication science and behavioral economics to compare the impact of telehealth strategies on shared decision-making in 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 in 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.
In addition to developing new applications of telehealth in cancer care, the centers will focus on identifying and addressing telehealth-related disparities among racial and ethnic groups, rural residents, older adults, the uninsured, low-income people who are socially isolated, and people with limited digital literacy. All four centers are also being funded to train the next generation of telehealth 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, Ph.D., a program director in the Outcomes Research Branch in DCCPS. “This work will pave the way for having health care 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.”'
