Carevive Awarded National Cancer Institute SBIR Fast-Track to Advance Symptom Management Clinical Decision Support Technology

NORTH MIAMI, Fla., Feb. 14, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Carevive, a health technology company that builds cancer care management and patient engagement solutions to improve patient quality of life and clinical outcomes, announced today that it has been awarded a Phase I Small Business Innovations Research (SBIR) contract from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) entitled "Bridging the Guideline Implementation Gap: Clinical Decision-Support to Improve Cancer Symptom Management".  The contract will support the development of an electronic interoperable clinical decision support (CDS) tool for cancer-related symptom assessment and management.   This technology will leverage Carevive PROmPt™, the company's electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePRO) tool for symptom monitoring with current evidence-based guidelines and its interoperable clinical patient data to deliver personalized, evidence-based symptom management pathways. The user interface will be built based on insights from patients with cancer to ensure a positive patient experience. Carevive is the only company who applied for and received a Fast-Track Phase I/II contract award under this particular research topic.

"We are tremendously honored to have received this award from the NCI," said Dr. Carrie Stricker, Carevive's co-founder and the SBIR contract's principal investigator (along with co-principal investigator, Karen Hammelef,  DNP, RN) "Helping cancer patients live longer, healthier, and more fulfilled lives by bringing their voice into the care planning process is the core mission of Carevive. This project provides a unique opportunity to fulfill our mission by developing an innovative technology that identifies and manages patients' symptoms, to ensure individuals with cancer promptly and proactively receive the appropriate, evidence-based care they deserve."

Poorly controlled symptoms are a major threat to quality cancer care and outcomes, and contribute to poor quality of life and treatment adherence, avoidable healthcare utilization, and diminished survival. Cancer patients experience symptoms frequently, yet these are not recognized or addressed in up to 50% of clinical visits, and clinicians routinely underestimate symptom severity. Further, symptom management decisions are often made on clinical expertise and not best evidence, further contributing to poor outcomes. Fortunately, proactive symptom care approaches that incorporate patient reported outcomes (PROs) address this state of affairs and lead to improved clinical outcomes in oncology.

This current state affects the overall health of the cancer population and has been noted as a priority for improvement across many professional organizations including the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the Oncology Nursing Society. Improvement goals include identifying mechanisms to deliver symptom triage and management at the point of care and employing clinical decision support systems to enhance and streamline workflows, and establishing standardization and use of evidence-based guidelines in providing such care. Such proactive care models reduce symptom burden, emergency department (ED) use, and improve survival. While commercially available applications for symptom monitoring and clinical alerting proliferate, they lack personalized, computable tools for evidence-based management of the unique patient experience.  

The CDS tools developed in this project will build upon the Carevive ePRO platform and rules-based Carevive clinical intelligence system (CIS) that, since 2014, has both been extensively tested for feasibility, usability, and utility in over 37 cancer programs, as well as commercially used in over a dozen cancer centers for patient monitoring and personalized self-management of symptoms and other patient-reported outcomes. 

This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. HHSN261201800021C.

About Carevive
Carevive is a health technology company focusing on care management and patient engagement solutions to improve the quality of life and clinical outcomes of cancer patients. Our platform analyzes clinical and patient-reported data, and the latest clinical guidelines, to offer evidence-based recommendations to clinicians so they can improve patient outcomes from cancer treatment. Our health system customers often partner with us and life science companies to use our insights of the real-world cancer patient experience to inform the drug development process. Carevive has partnered with over 35 academic and community cancer programs and 8 oncology-focused life science companies. For more information, please visit http://www.carevive.com or follow us @carevive.

SOURCE Carevive