COVID-19 disrupted cancer care for patients across the country, which furthered the effort to bring that care into the home, a practice done far less in the U.S. compared to other developed countries around the world.
Specifically, the Children’s Oncology Group — an organization devoted to childhood and adolescent cancer research — began talks with Signify Health (NYSE: SGFY) to help move more care into the home.
The two organizations ultimately announced a partnership in June that would facilitate clinical trial participation for pediatric patients through in-home clinical services.
“I really do think we’re going to see more cancer care in the home, and I think it’s part of a larger trend, where more and more specific disease categories will see additional home-based resources brought to bear for their patient populations,” Marc Rothman, the CMO of Signify, told Home Health Care News.
Dallas-based Signify is a value-based care platform that focuses on home-based approaches to care.
A striking example of the effects of the pandemic on cancer care was reflected in Indiana, as the state saw a nearly 50% reduction in follow-up care and a nearly 40% reduction in outpatient chemo, according to a recent study.
While wide-ranging adoption of at-home cancer care models has not yet occured, oncologists have touted its benefits. For instance, in 2019, authors in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) pointed to the model’s success abroad and argued it could have similar success in the U.S.
“The building blocks for an oncology hospital at-home are already in place in the United States,” the authors wrote in JCO. “Management of many specific cancer-related symptoms and complications is feasible in the home setting. Outpatient management of low-risk febrile neutropenia is as safe and effective as inpatient management, at half the cost.”
The University of Utah’s Huntsman Cancer Institute’s Huntsman at Home program is a prime example of what at-home cancer care could be. The program works with Community Nursing Services to provide care to individuals who would rather receive care outside the hospital.
In general, there’s a lot of reasons why more at-home cancer care would be beneficial for the health care system in the U.S., Rothman said.
“No. 1, it’s incredibly expensive. No. 2, the treatments themselves can be very, very debilitating and tense in their delivery,” he said. “People will start therapies and before they’re over, are already feeling ill. And third, they’re immunocompromised, … so there’s a fear factor involved for many cancer patients, especially for children and their parents, in going into the centers where the care has traditionally been delivered.
Those fears were obviously exacerbated by COVID-19. The combination of those three elements, though, makes the concept of at-home cancer care seem like a no-brainer.
In the Signify-COG collaboration, pediatric patients participating in a clinical trial for a therapy to treat B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia will now have expanded options to facilitate receipt of experimental treatment at home.
“This collaboration to provide in-home clinical services will allow more children to spend time at home receiving the investigational therapy while enabling much-needed research to deliver safer, and hopefully more effective therapies,” Mignon Loh, the Chair of the COG ALL Committee, said in a statement. “A decentralized clinical trial approach will relieve unnecessary stress on families who are struggling financially and emotionally from their child’s cancer diagnosis.”
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