Introduction
lymphoma, cancer, hematological malignancies
COLORECTAL CANCER, CANCER, HEMATOLOGICAL MALIGNANCIES, SOLID TUMORS, MALIGNANCIES, SECONDARY, LYMPHOMA
The time burdens imposed by cancer care are increasingly recognized, especially among persons with advanced solid tumors where the absolute survival benefit offered by a treatment may be small.To optimize patient centeredness (since seemingly short days can turn into all-day affairs) and practicality (dichotomous and easily determined outcome), our proposed measure of this time spent considers a day with in-person healthcare system contact as a healthcare contact day, or a “”contact day’’. We have demonstrated that in a clinical trial in patients with advanced colorectal cancer, the additional 6 weeks of increased overall survival with the experimental agent was offset by an equal number of contact days.While a majority of our initial work has focused on persons with advanced solid tumors, burdens of care are relevant to people with hematological malignancies. Prior work in hematology malignancies has largely focused on inpatient days, or nights spent away from home, and has not consistently accounted for outpatient visits.As with solid tumors, different cancer treatment approaches for hematological malignancies may have similar or marginally different oncologic outcomes. In such cases, their associated contact days can aid patient-oncologist decision making regarding which treatment approach to pursue. We conducted a secondary analysis of a completed randomized controlled trial in patients with relapsed/ refractory lymphoma to assess the feasibility of extracting and comparing contact days and home days between arms.