Dr. Michael Hassett of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute shared new findings showing deployment of eSyM, an ePRO-based, EHR-integrated symptom management program, was associated with statistically significant and potentially meaningful improvements in overall survival. Strategies to improve adoption of ePRO-based symptom management may be warranted.
At ESCO 2026, I'll be presenting the results of the ESO clinical trial. This was a randomized trial that looked at the impact of an electronic patient-reported outcome-based symptom management program for patients receiving chemotherapy or surgery for cancer. The results were a secondary analysis looking at the overall survival outcomes. In prior ASCO meetings, we've shown that ESIM, the program that we developed and deployed across six health systems, Reduced acute care utilization, including having fewer emergency department visits in the hospital admissions and improved symptom burden. In this analysis, we looked at the survival outcomes one year after starting treatment. And we found through this analysis that ESIM when it was deployed, uh, and used by patients was associated with improvement in overall survival, uh, for both patients receiving chemotherapy and for patients having surgery. One of the challenges with ISIM as a program though is that it was only used by 50% of patients, and we still see it as a, as a barrier to programs having an impact that uh Not everybody uses the programs, and if not everybody uses the programs, you don't see the same impact. So, um, one of the takeaways from this project for us is the importance of implementation work to identify and overcome the barriers to implementing programs like EE across large cancer centers.
