Cancer patients with Covid-19 who receive care at home via remote patient monitoring are significantly less likely to require hospitalisation, according to a study by Mayo Clinic.

Researchers at Mayo Clinic’s cancer centre compared this with cancer patients with Covid-19 who did not participate in the programme. Results of the study were presented this month at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting and published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

“For our study, we evaluated 224 Mayo Clinic patients with cancer who were found to have Covid-19 through standardised screening prior to receiving cancer treatment, or due to symptoms or close exposure,” said Tufia Haddad, a Mayo Clinic medical oncologist and the study’s senior author. Researchers followed the patients from March to July last year.

Haddad said at the outset of the pandemic Mayo Clinic rapidly developed and implemented a remote patient monitoring programme to support patients who were diagnosed with Covid-19 and at risk for severe illness.

The programme used in-home technology to monitor oxygen levels, vital signs and symptoms of Covid-19 infection, and a centralised virtual care team of nurses and physicians to manage patients. Haddad said the programme had served more than 8000 patients in rural and urban locations across 41 states by November 2020.

Researchers found among patients who did not require urgent hospitalisation at the time of their Covid-19 diagnosis, those whose care was managed by remote patient monitoring were significantly less likely to require hospitalisation for their illness, compared with those who were not managed by the programme.

“After balancing the two groups of patients who were or were not managed by the remote monitoring programme for factors known to impact Covid-19 outcomes, such as old age, male gender and obesity, there was a 78% reduction in the risk of hospitalisation – a 2.8% risk for patients on the remote monitoring programme, compared to 13% for patients not on the programme – attributed to the remote monitoring programme,” said Haddad.

In addition, she said that when cancer patients who had been managed through remote monitoring were hospitalised, they experienced fewer hospitalisations of more than a week, ICU admissions and deaths.

“It is possible that our results were due to early detection of adverse symptoms and vital sign trends that enabled earlier care interventions to alter the trajectory of disease,” she said.

Haddad said she was encouraged by the results, but cautioned that further research would be necessary to confirm them.

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