Technology Facilitated Behavioral Intervention for Depression among Diverse Patients in Ambulatory Oncology

About This Grant

Project Summary / Abstract Depression is one of the most common psychological comorbidities experienced throughout the cancer continuum. Elevated depressive symptoms in oncology patients is a major concern as unmanaged depressive symptoms in cancer patients is associated with poor health-related quality of life (HRQoL), poor adherence to cancer treatments, delayed return to work and baseline function, greater emergency department visits, greater risk of suicide, and higher all-cause mortality. Behavioral interventions for the management of depression are efficacious, but scalability and implementation of these evidence-based interventions in oncology is limited. Health information technologies (HIT) provide an ideal opportunity to expedite the administration, scoring, and interpretation of depression screening with well-validated, brief and precise measurement tools that can capture actionable data to screen for depression, and deliver pragmatic and scalable evidence-based behavioral interventions that are proven to reduce depressive symptomatology across various other populations. Despite the benefits of these HITs, use of technology-based models to screen and deliver evidence-based behavioral treatments that address the depressive symptoms in cancer remains underdeveloped and poorly implemented. We will evaluate the effectiveness and the implementation of an evidence-based HIT behavioral treatment for cancer patients with elevated depressive symptoms. This HIT treatment combines systematic, electronic health record-integrated screening for depressive symptoms with an individually-tailored HIT interventions to address gaps in the treatment of depression among cancer patients. The study takes place across two distinct health systems in two major metropolitan areas—Chicago and Miami (Northwestern Medicine and University of Miami Health System). We aim to conduct a pragmatic Type I effectiveness-implementation hybrid trial of My Cancer Support—an evidence-based, tailored behavioral HIT program for the management of elevated depressive symptoms—in ambulatory oncology care settings within two large health systems. We will establish the effectiveness of My Cancer Support on depressive symptoms(i.e., primary outcome) and anxiety, HRQoL, and health services use (i.e. secondary outcomes) compared to usual care. We will evaluate the process of implementing My Cancer Support and its impact on patient and system-level outcomes, including reach, adoption, maintenance, and acceptability. Next, we will identify facilitators and barriers to wide-scale implementation of My Cancer Support beyond Northwestern Medicine and University of Miami Health System. Finally, we will explore whether the effects of My Cancer Support vary across SES, language, disease severity, severity of depressive symptoms, recruitment sites, and other patient and clinical characteristics.