Project description
Personalising palliative care for cancer patients
Cancer patients often get caught in a bottleneck of tedious procedures to arrange appointments or communicate with specialists when they require immediate medical attention or pre-emptive advice. The EU-funded MyPal project aims to set up an integrated digital health system for cancer patient care that will facilitate communication between patients and healthcare providers. Clinical trials to validate the system will be carried out with both adult and child patients. The system will enable patients and their families to actively report concerns and changes in condition and receive prompt prognosis and advice from specialists such as oncologists, physicians and psychologists. Consequently, cancer patients will receive timely palliative care that is adapted to their personal needs.
Objective
MyPal aims to foster early palliative care for cancer patients by leveraging patient reported outcome (PRO) systems through their adaptation to the personal needs of the cancer patient and his/her caregiver(s). Through this intervention, MyPal aspires to empower cancer patients (and their family members) in capturing more accurately their conditions, communicate them with a seamless and effective way to their healthcare providers and, ultimately, foster the time for action through the rapid identification of important deviations in the patient’s state and QoL. Providing this information in a timely and comprehensive manner throughout the disease course will reinforce the potential for applying a patient-centred and integrated palliative care approach for cancer with the participation of all relevant healthcare providers (i.e. oncologists, specialized physicians, psychologists, nurses), which is necessary to cope with the specific disease. In order to accomplish its mission, MyPal will exploit technological advances on digital health to support patients, family members and healthcare providers in gaining value through this systematic and comprehensive PRO-based intervention. Overall, the foreseen advancement through MyPal reflects a paradigm shift from passive patient reporting based on conventional PRO approaches to active patient engagement and a closed-loop approach (bridging the gap between patient reporting and effective actions by healthcare providers to meet the varying patient needs) for coping with palliative care challenges in cancer. MyPal will demonstrate and validate the proposed intervention in two clinical studies, an RCT for adults with hematologic cancers and an observational study for children suffering from solid tumors and hematologic malignancies, hence targeting different age groups and cancer types. The clinical studies will be conducted in diverse healthcare settings in 6 clinical sites from 5 European countries.
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Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
57001 Thermi Thessaloniki
Greece