Online self-reporting tool extends cancer survival

A randomised clinical trial shows that a simple intervention — a web-based tool that enables patients to report their symptoms in real time, triggering alerts to clinicians — can have major benefits, including longer survival. Patients with metastatic cancer who used the tool while receiving chemotherapy lived a median of five months longer than those who did not use it, according to the study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (doi: 10.1200/JCO.2015.63.0830). These findings were presented in a plenary session, which featured four abstracts deemed to have the greatest potential to impact patient care, out of the more than 5,000…