NIH Announces 4 Telehealth Research Centers of Excellence for Cancer Care

Four health systems will receive $23 million to launch research programs into how telehealth can be used to improve cancer treatment and care management.

The National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute (NCI) has designated four health systems as national centers for excellence for their work in using telehealth to improve cancer treatment and care management.

The four programs will split $23 million over the next five years to establish the NCI's Telehealth Research Centers of Excellence (TRACE) initiative, which is being supported by the Cancer Moonshot, launched in 2016 and restarted earlier this year by President Joe Biden.

“These centers will address important gaps in telehealth and cancer-related care delivery,” Robin C. Vanderpool, DrPH, chief of the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch at the NCI's Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS), said in a press release. “We need to establish an evidence base for using this technology to deliver healthcare in oncology and make it part of routine care. In addition, these centers will explore opportunities for scalability and dissemination of their cancer-related telehealth interventions beyond their own health systems.”

The use of telehealth and digital health skyrocketed during the pandemic, as healthcare organizations sought to reduce the spread of the virus by shifting in-person services to virtual platforms. This shift was especially valuable to cancer care programs, whose patients are at risk of serious complications if they become infected.

The four centers are:

• The Telehealth Research and Innovation for Veterans with Cancer (THRIVE) Telehealth Research Center. Based at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine, the center will work with the Veterans Health Administration to examine how social factors such as race and ethnicity, poverty, and rural residence affect the delivery of telehealth for cancer care.
• The Scalable Telehealth Cancer Care (STELLAR) Center. Located at Northwestern University outside Chicago, this program will focus on using telehealth to extend health services to cancer survivors aimed at reducing risk behaviors such as smoking and physical inactivity.
• The University of Pennsylvania Telehealth Research Center of Excellence (Penn TRACE). Located at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Penn TRACE will apply communication science and behavioral economics to study the value of several telehealth strategies on shared decision-making for lung cancer screening and to improve timely access to comprehensive molecular testing for advanced lung cancer.
• The Making Telehealth Delivery of Cancer Care at Home Effective and Safe (MATCHES) Telehealth Research Center. Based at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is New York City, this program will study the effectiveness of a remote patient monitoring platform called MSK@Home for patients receiving systemic treatments for prostate and breast cancer.

“These centers will be at the cutting edge of some amazing breakthroughs by creating sustainable and effective telehealth options tailored specifically for cancer care,” Roxanne E. Jensen, PhD, a program director in the Outcomes Research Branch in DCCPS who is overseeing the TRACE initiative with Vanderpool, said in the press release. “This work will pave the way for having healthcare delivery look a lot different for cancer patients over the next five to 10 years, and that's really exciting and in alignment with the goals of the Cancer Moonshot initiative.”