The COVID-19 Pandemic and Transition to Digital Health in Clinical Oncology Care.

Background: Clinical oncology care is complex, and new technologies can improve efficiency, contribute to safe treatment delivery, and enhance care for the patient. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a shift to the use of digital health technologies to provide care. Oncology care providers can ensure that technology is integrated with the patient's plan of care.

InSight Care Pilot Program: Redefining Seeing a Patient.

Purpose: Early detection and management of symptoms in patients with cancer improves outcomes. However, the optimal approach to symptom monitoring and management is unknown. InSight Care is a mobile health intervention that captures symptom data and facilitates patient-provider communication to mitigate symptom escalation.

Access to Care: Using eHealth to Limit Location-Based Barriers for Patients With Cancer.

Background: Rural and urban communities may encounter barriers to care, which can lead to delays in timely screening, diagnosis, and treatment. eHealth interventions, such as televisits and remote patient monitoring, are being used increasingly to improve patient access to quality clinical cancer care and to support patient-provider communication.

Objectives: This article describes how eHealth can bridge gaps in patient access to cancer care and provides insight into successful eHealth program implementation.

Misery Loves Company: Presenting Symptom Clusters to Urgent Care by Patients Receiving Antineoplastic Therapy.

Purpose: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) identifies suboptimal management of treatment toxicities as a care gap and proposes the measurement of hospital performance on the basis of emergency department visits for 10 common symptoms. Current management strategies do not address symptom co-occurrence.

Methods: We evaluated symptom co-occurrence in three patient cohorts that presented to a cancer hospital urgent care center in 2016.

Safe and Effective Standards of Care: Supporting the Administration of T-VEC for Patients With Advanced Melanoma in the Outpatient Oncology Setting .

Background: Talimogene laherparepvec (T-VEC) is the first oncolytic virus (OV) to demonstrate therapeutic benefit for the treatment of advanced melanoma. As a live virus, the use of T-VEC in medical and surgical outpatient clinics posed challenges. 
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Immunotherapy Administration: Oncology Nursing Society Recommendations .

As the use of immunotherapeutic agents increases in single-agent and multimodality treatment regimens, oncology nurses face the challenge of administering and caring for patients receiving new and unique agents. Oncology Nursing Society clinical staff and clinical nurses collaborated to produce a set of recommendations to educate nurses involved with the monitoring of patients receiving immunotherapy on administration procedures and safe handling of these agents to ensure patient and staff safety and to reduce risk of error. The recommendations are meant to provide clinical nurses with a framework on which to build policies and procedures for administering new treatment modalities.