[The role and use of Patient Reported Outcomes in the management of cancer patients]

Abstract

Therapeutic innovations in the field of oncology allow to manage cancer as a chronic illness with treatments being administered over prolonged periods of time. In this context, it is now acknowledged that it is important to complete the assessment of benefit based on purely clinical endpoints using outcome measurement evaluated by patients themselves. The Patient reported outcome (PRO) concept has then emerged and there is an increasing interest in using the PROs as an indicator of the benefit of new therapeutic strategies. In this paper, we aim to illustrate the potential use and value of using PROs in the management of cancer patients. After a brief review of the PRO concept and it's link with the quality-of-life concept, this paper describes the actual implementation of PROs, first in clinical research, then in routine clinical practice. We then will focus on the difficulties in the French context to promote a larger use of PROs in the routine clinical practice. This paper will show how the PROs are a useful tool to improve the management of cancer patients.

Keywords: Cancer; Patient Reported Outcome; Patient reported outcome.