Neoplasms

Respiratory Tract (Lung and Bronchial) Diseases

All Conditions

Symptoms and General Pathology

Behaviors and Mental Disorders

Lung Neoplasms

Carcinoma, Non-Small-Cell Lung

Death

Carcinoma

Respiratory Tract Neoplasms

Thoracic Neoplasms

Lung Diseases

Respiratory Tract Diseases

Carcinoma, Bronchogenic

Bronchial Neoplasms

Quality of Life

Patients will be monitored allowing the delivery of timely and personalized care via a 4-level program:

1. Screening and psychosocial monitoring through a mobile application where patients have a messaging system to contact their psychologist and reference nurse.
2. Psychoeducation and health education campus, where patients can consult videos and online resources developed by health professionals, containing scientifically validated information.
3. Psychosocial support community where patients can share doubts, fears, and experiences with other patients with advanced lung cancer. This private social network is monitored by team specialists when necessary.
4. Online group psychotherapy of 8 weekly sessions of 90 minutes based on Meaning-Centered Group Psychotherapy (MCGP; Breitbart et al., 2010). Patients at this level will be on a waiting list, so the pool starts when there are 4-8 users available.

This group will receive standard psychosocial care for cancer survivors at ICO Hospitalet center led by a clinical psychologist. It consists of 7 individual sessions of 45-60 minutes, scheduled every 2-3 weeks during 9 months and focused on emotional support and psychoeducation. Moreover, they will be offered the education materials from the 2nd step of the platform, as they are compiled in a website open to all patients and relatives.

1. Screening and monitoring: weekly administration of an emotional state thermometer. If the score is \>5, participants are asked to complete the HADS. If HADS' score \>10, step 2 is assigned. The same procedure is followed for steps 3 \& 4. Participants remain in each step for 2 weeks, and all level changes are preceded by a videoconference with a health professional
2. Online psychoeducation campus: displays co-constructed videos and posts developed by health professionals and patients about LC diagnosis and treatment aspects.
3. Online support community: anonymous survivors with LC diagnoses are included. Professionals and patient mentors supervise and foster debate, peer support, and resolve health Q\&As.
4. Weekly online group psychotherapy led by a clinical psychologist and composed of eight 90-minute sessions. Eligible users are placed on a waiting list, starting when 5-6 users are available.

E-health ecosystem of stepped psychosocial care

Usual psychosocial care for cancer survivors at ICOHospitalet centre led by a clinical psychologist. Usual psychosocial care consists of 7 individual sessions of 45-60 minutes, with 2-3 weeks of space between sessions, based on Individual Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy (IMCP) for Patients With Advanced Cancer (Breitbart et al., 2012). Moreover, they will be offered the education materials from the 2nd step of the platform, as they are compiled on a website open to all patients and relatives.

Usual psychosocial care

Maria Serra Blasco, PhD

Cristian Ochoa, PhD

Being diagnosed with cancer impairs many areas of a person's life. Although efficacious educational, emotional and social interventions exist in this regard, they often reach few survivors and late. This project, carried out by a specialized centre in cancer care and health research, will study the effectiveness, costs, and utility associated with a digital ecosystem tailored to meet the needs of patients with advanced lung cancer. This solution bridges the gap between patients and professionals to offer health services precisely when they are needed. The project is developed in the first year of an advanced lung cancer diagnosis, comparing the effects of the digital ecosystem with usual care in terms of their capacity to improve various psychosocial indicators. A comparative economic analysis will be carried out as well, to prove the cost-utility of the digital ecosystem presented.

Palliative Care (PC) for patients with advanced life-limiting diseases and the management of their symptoms during the trajectory of illness has evolved considerably (Clark, 2007). PC is conceptualized as an approach to improve the quality of life of patients and their relatives "through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other physical, psychosocial and spiritual problems". In recent years, survival rates have increased for most cancer diagnoses, in both early and advanced stages. Therefore, patients suffering a disease considered incurable are living longer with cumulative psychosocial comorbidity derived from both the illness itself and its associated treatments. The American and European societies for medical oncology have recently recommended integrating early psychosocial PC into standard oncological practice for patients with metastatic or advanced stage diseases like lung cancer (LC) in their professional guidelines. This decision has been recently supported by meta-analytic results as well. Those studies show that palliative interventions including physical and psychological aspects have beneficial effects on patients, both on short-term quality of life and in general symptom burden.

Despite the advantages of such integrated PC interventions, healthcare systems usually encounter several barriers to implementing psychosocial care in palliative settings, like in advanced LC. The most typical include poor early detection of such needs; long waiting lists; and mobility restrictions, with many patients unable to attend visits in person. The literature strongly suggests that emotional distress is associated with worse quality of life, lower adherence to oncological treatments and adoption of unhealthy lifestyles. Actually, it is also demonstrated that stress reduction may even extend survival years. Since LC patients show great symptom variability, erratic evolution and high emotional impact along with a limited prognosis, it is urgent to increase the currently small proportion of patients with early screening, close and intensive monitoring and prompt referral to PC teams. To this aim, new approaches in psychosocial PC are needed to overcome the barriers experienced today.

In the last years, two main actions have been proposed to improve the implementation of psychosocial care in PC, placing a focus on its accessibility and efficiency. For example, recent studies have introduced earlier stepped (low to high intensity) and adaptive treatments as an ingenious and sensible response to the challenge of offering proper psychosocial interventions, with high cost-effectiveness in cancer. Another comprehensive action is to make use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). ICT has emerged in the last few years as an innovative resource to set this new wave of health practices in motion, with an exponential increase in its use and implementation during the COVID pandemic, to guarantee continuity of care in vulnerable advanced cancer patients. ICT have also shown their capability to overcome most of the limitations expressed in conventional care settings. These tools have provided faster and more intense follow-up options to monitor patients' warning signs, facilitating better communication between patients and professionals, and also leveraging cheaper and more accessible clinical treatments compared to traditional alternatives, even at the end of life. Nevertheless, the few studies comparing ICT and usual psychosocial interventions have found mixed effectiveness results so far.

Recently, ONCOMMUN, a European proposal for creating an e-health ecosystem (https://oncommun.eu/), has combined these two promising actions to facilitate early psychosocial care in an online and stepped psychosocial program. ONCOMMUN has shown promising preliminary results on breast cancer (BC) and a high potential for therapeutic application in advanced and palliative settings, like LC. The first level of care in this program is an online screening and monitoring tool, followed by a patient's campus comprising educational interventions (second level), a psychosocial support community (third level), and psychotherapeutic treatment groups through videoconference (fourth level).

The current project has been designed as a randomized non-inferiority controlled trial to compare an e-health ecosystem of psychosocial care, based on the ONCOMMUN proposal, against traditional in-person psychosocial treatment in PC during advanced LC. Our group proposes the development and adaptation of this digital ecosystem by integrating screening and monitoring tools with educational and psychological interventions, building upon the results of its recent implementation in BC. This innovative e-health ecosystem intends to foster healthy experiences, integrating a four-stepped psychosocial program of early PC focused on patients with a diagnosis of non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) at advanced stages (III and IV).

OBJECTIVES (3 years)

General

1. To offer early detection and tailored treatment of psychosocial and physical needs of advanced LC survivors.
2. To implement and assess an online stepped ecosystem for psychosocial and educational screening, monitoring and care, through the use of an e-health platform specifically developed for advanced LC patients.

Specific objectives

1. To compare the capacity of the digital ecosystem to detect and deliver early psychosocial care compared to treatment as usual.
2. To improve or cushion the consequences of the advanced lung cancer course and treatment in terms of emotional distress, demoralization and quality of life.
3. To explore the potential mediating and facilitating role of spirituality in an optimal psychosocial adaptation.
4. To study the cost-utility associated with both interventions in terms of Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALY), through the estimation of patients' use of additional health services, their degree of pharmacological adherence, intake of psychotropic medication, and time spent in disability leaves.
5. To disseminate to cancer patients, professionals and the general public the results of the study.

Procedure and data acquisition

1. Development of an LC platform: LC platform will be adapted from the BC platform and fed by the results of the pilot LC system and focus groups with professionals and patients. The LC solution will share a set of structural items (e.g., measurement instruments, instant symptom management), to which specific resources for LC will be added. Patients' experience will be at the centre of this development stage to maximize usability and understanding of all resources.
2. Validation with users: Patients with advanced LC diagnosis will be invited to participate by their medical team. If interested, they will be contacted by our group and a face-to-face meeting will be scheduled, where the study will be described and informed consent signed in case of acceptance. Participants will be then randomized to 1) e-health ecosystem or 2) usual psychosocial care by an external researcher blind to the research questions and treatment conditions, using a random sequence of numbers generated by REDCap software. In the eHealth ecosystem group, participants lacking equipment will be offered webcams and tablets as needed. There are specific processes of the system that will only apply to ICOnnecta't branch as they will measure the platform usability and their associate emotional state during the study (see Interventions section below). All other measures will be administered from T0 to T3 through a professional online survey platform compliant with the latest European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR; EC/2016/679).

Data collection and analysis

Two databases will be created: The first one will associate participants' identifiable personal data (e.g., names, patient ID) with an alphanumeric code, and will be saved in an encrypted external hard drive stored in a key-protected closet within the office of the PI. The second database, created via REDCap system, will record all data to be analyzed making use of alphanumeric codes and will be stored in a secure collaborative cloud also GDPR-compliant. This procedure will allow us to conduct the analyses anonymously. Data will be monthly downloaded from REDCap and backed up in a second encrypted external hard drive. Every 3 months one researcher will conduct a data integrity check. While online systems automatically keep a registry of users' access, a notebook will remain next to the hard drives for researchers authorized by PIs to record their name, date and time when drives are retrieved and returned. Finally, the information collected through the eHealth ecosystem will also be stored in a GDPR-compliant server.

Descriptive results will be provided for sociodemographic and clinical variables, as well as for education, usability and satisfaction indicators, while between-group differences will be assessed with Student's t-test and chi-square tests as appropriate. Multilevel linear models (MLM) will be used to compare both groups in outcome variables, while effect sizes (Hedges' g) will be reported and non-inferiority tested. For QALY analyses, results from the EQ-5D-3L will be used together with costs associated with professional salaries, adherence, infrastructure, psychotropic medication and sick leaves. The effect of any potential confounding variable will be analyzed. Analyses will be conducted using SPSS v24.021 (IBM SPSS Statistics 21, 2017) by the IDIBELL biostatistics department.

Non-inferiority randomized trial testing two experimental conditions: 1) ehealth ecosystem, 2) usual psychosocial care. Assessment of main outcomes are conducted at recruitment (T0), 3 months from T0 (T1), 6 months from T0 (T2), and 9 months from T0 (T3). Hence, the design is 2 (treatment conditions) X 4 (assessments). The whole project's methodology adheres to the principles of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI).

The sample size has been estimated with the support of the R software (R Core Team, 2020), setting a non-inferiority margin of 5 points in the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (Vaganian et al., 2020), with power at 80% and one-tailed α of 2.5%. A dropout rate of 25% was assumed. It was anticipated that 152 participants were necessary (n = 76 per arm) to ensure that a two-sided 95% confidence interval would exclude the non-inferiority threshold.

Psychosocial eHealth in Advanced Lung Cancer

Stepped and Early Psychosocial Care in Advanced Lung Cancer Through E-health

Emotional distress will be assessed through the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS; Zigmond \& Snaith, 1983). The HADS measures symptoms of anxiety and depression and consists of 14 items: seven items for the anxiety subscale (HADS Anxiety) and seven for the depression subscale (HADS Depression). HADS Anxiety focuses mainly on symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder and HADS Depression is focused on anhedonia, the main symptom of depression. Each item is scored on a response scale with four alternatives ranging between 0 and 3. Higher scores means higher levels of depression and anxiety.

Spirituality will be assessed through the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy - Spiritual Well-Being (FACIT-Sp; Peterman et al., 2002). This scale includes factors of meaning, peace and faith, assessed through 12 items rated on a 0-4 Likert scale. The overall score ranges between 0 and 48, and between 0 and 16 for each subscale, where higher scores are indicative of greater spiritual well-being.

Demoralization will be measured through the Demoralization Scale (DS-II; Kissane et al., 2004). The DS-II is a 3-point response, self-report scale comprising 16 items and 2 subscales: distress and coping ability, and meaning and purpose. Scores \<10 indicate no demoralization, between 10-19 moderate demoralization, and \>20 severe demoralization.

Health-Related Quality Of Life (HRQOL) will be assessed through the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Lung (FACT-L; Cella et al., 1995). The FACT-L is a 36-item, lung cancer-specific instrument that also includes the symptom-based Lung Cancer Sub-scale (LCS). It has 36 items organized into 5 subscales: 1) physical well-being, 2) functional well-being, 3) social/family well-being, 4) emotional well-being and 5) lung cancer. Responses are scored on a Likert-type scale ranging from 0 (not at all) to 4 (very much). Higher scores correspond to a better quality of life.

QoL will be measured through the European Quality of Life Scale (EQ-5D-3L; EQ-5D User Guides, 2021). The EQ-5D-3L consists of 2 pages: the EQ5D descriptive system and the EQ visual analogue scale (EQ VAS). The EQ-5D-3L descriptive system comprises the following five dimensions: mobility, self-care, usual activities, pain/discomfort and anxiety/depression. Each dimension has 3 levels: no problems, some problems, and extreme problems. The EQ VAS records the patient's self-rated health on a vertical visual analogue scale of 100 points where the endpoints are labelled 'Best imaginable health state' and 'Worst imaginable health state'.

Symptom management will be measured through the Edmonton Symptom Assessment System (ESAS-r; Carvajal et al., 2012). ESAS-r is an instrument that is commonly used both in PC and in advanced cancer situations. It has 10 visual numerical scales that assess physical and psychological symptoms. Patients choose the number that best represents the intensity of each symptom on a scale of 0 to 10.

Medication adherence will be measured through the Simplified Medication Adherence Questionnaire (ARMS-e; Kripalani et al., 2009). The ARMS-e assesses medication adherence in patients with chronic conditions in 12 self-reported items with 4 response possibilities: never, sometimes, most of the time and always. Lower overall scores correspond to better adherence.

Users' satisfaction with the platform will be measured through a 0-10 Visual Analogic Scale (VAS). Higher scores correspond to higher satisfaction.

Platform's usability will be asked to users through a 0-10 Visual Analogic Scale (VAS). Higher scores correspond to higher usability.

Emotional wellbeing will be measured through an emotional thermometer (ET; Harju et al., 2019) using a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) (0-10). Higher scores correspond to higher well-being.

Asociación Española contra el Cáncer

Institut d'Investigació Biomèdica de Bellvitge

Institut Català d'Oncologia

Skin and Connective Tissue Diseases

Breast Neoplasms

Breast Diseases

Skin Diseases

A group of breast cancer survivors will be randomly allocated (1:1 allocation) to the online integrated and stepped psychosocial care group

A group of breast cancer survivors will be randomly allocated (1:1 allocation) to the usual psychosocial care group

This program features four levels of care, increasing in intensity of psychosocial care as patients move from one level to the next one.

Step 1: Screening and monitoring of several psychosocial variables through the central mobile application of the program (App ICOnnecta't).

Step 2: Online guided and self-help psychoeducation Campus in which patients can consult videos and online resources, co-constructed between health professionals and patients, containing reliable and rigorous information related to the oncological process.

Step 3: Online community of psychosocial support. Participants can choose from 12 cancer-related discussion forums and share with the community any health-related question that worries them fostering, thus, debate and stimulating peer-support.

Step 4: Intensive online group psychotherapy (App ICOnnecta't Videoconsultation), based on the Group Positive Psychotherapy program for cancer survivors (Ochoa, Sumalla, Maté, Castejón, Rodríguez et al., 2010).

Online integrated and stepped psychosocial care

This active control group will receive the standard psychosocial treatment for cancer survivors in the participating centers, led by a clinical psychologist and consisting of 8 individual, 45/60-minute sessions, each of which every 1-2 months, focused on providing emotional support and psychoeducation during the first year of primary cancer treatment.

This multicenter randomized controlled study will appraise the effectiveness and cost-utility of an e-health ecosystem with integrated and stepped psychosocial services that will be compared with the usual psychosocial care. The study is developed in the acute survival phase among breast cancer survivors. The outcomes of both interventions will be compared in terms of the amount of waiting time to receive psychosocial care and changes in several psychosocial variables. Finally, a comparative economic analysis will be conducted in other relevant psychosocial and health parameters. The e-health platform is expected to outperform usual care in the aforementioned indicators, while reaching high acceptability and usability by survivors, and additionally reducing costs for health providers.

Cancer diagnosis and treatment causes a huge psychosocial impact on breast cancer survivors. Psychosocial treatments in cancer survivors have already demonstrated their effectiveness in reducing emotional distress and improving quality of life although the access to them still presents important barriers, such as poor early detection, long waiting times for diagnosis or treatment, as well as other restrictions related to work, mobility or economic situation. In addition, the current digitization of screening, monitoring and psychosocial treatment poses a revolution in the improvement of the quality of care and the reduction of its economic burden. The objectives of this study are, first, to assess the clinical efficacy of an e-health platform that includes integrated and stepped psychosocial services, in comparison to usual psychosocial care, and second, to examine its cost-utility.

The study methodology is that of a multicentre randomised controlled trial with 2 parallel groups (experimental versus control group). Approximately 193 patients diagnosed with breast cancer in the acute survival phase will be recruited from 3 University hospitals in Catalonia (Spain) and will be randomised to one of two treatment conditions. All participants will be evaluated at the beginning of the study (T1: recruitment), 3 months from T1 (T2), 6 months from T1 (T3) and 12 months from T1 (T4). Primary outcome measures will include detection of clinical cases, amount of waiting time from detection to psychosocial intervention, and proportion of cases solved in the different steps of the intervention, as well as outcomes related to emotional distress, quality of life, post-traumatic stress and growth and therapeutic alliance. Secondary outcomes will include the acceptability of the platform by patients through satisfaction questionnaires and the usability of the platform. For the cost-utility analysis, the investigators will assess quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and costs related to the number of days of sick leaves, healthcare utilization, adherence to pharmacological treatment, health professionals' costs, infrastructure and transport costs.

The study will provide an important advance in the treatment of breast cancer; in the long term, it is expected to improve the quality of patient care and the treatment efficacy and to reduce waiting lists as well as direct and indirect costs associated with the treatment of the disease in Spain.

The current clinical trial is a multicenter Randomised Controlled Trial with 2 parallel groups. The effectiveness of the online integrated and stepped psychosocial care group will be compared with the usual psychosocial care group

Online Psychosocial Cancer Screening, Monitoring and Stepped Treatment in Cancer Survivors

Online Psychosocial Cancer Screening, Monitoring and Stepped Treatment in Cancer Survivors: A Randomized Controlled Trial

The following IPD are to be shared with other researchers: Age (aggregated), civil status (aggregated), education (aggregated), occupational status (aggregated), date of enrolment (aggregated), date of opt out (aggregated and if applicable), date of oncological diagnosis (aggregated), cancer stage, oncological treatment (aggregated), psychotropic medication (aggregated), treatment arm in the study, and results from scales and subscales of psychometric instruments. Only ITT participants' data will be retained in the dataset.

Emotional thermometer (ET) - Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) (0-10) of the ICOnnecta't application.

Scores on health education questionnaires from Campus of ICOnnecta't. Higher scores indicate better health education acquisition.

System Usability Scale (SUS) (Brooke, 1996). The SUS is a 10-item questionnaire with five response options that range from 4 = "Strongly agree" to 0 = "Strongly disagree". The SUS provides a "quick and dirty" reliable tool for measuring the usability of a range of systems.The participant's scores for each question are converted to a new number, added together and then multiplied by 2.5 to convert the original scores of 0-40 to 0-100. Higher scores indicate better outcomes.

Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) (Zigmond \& Snaith, 1983; Spanish validation by Costa-Requena, Pérez Martín, Salamero Baró, \& Gil Moncayo, 2009). It consists of 14 items, 7 for anxiety and 7 for depression, on a four-point Likert scale (range 0-3), with the total score ranging from 0 to 42. Higher scores indicate a greater level of distress.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist-Civilian version (PCL-5) (Blevins, Weathers, Davis, Witte, \& Domino, 2015). The official Spanish translation of the instrument was provided by the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (www.ptsd.va.gov/). The PCL-5 is a 20-item questionnaire, corresponding to the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders Version 5" symptom criteria for PTSD. The self-report rating scale is 0-4 for each symptom, reflecting a change from 1-5 in the DSM-IV version. Rating scale descriptors are the same: "Not at all," "A little bit," Moderately," "Quite a bit," and "Extremely." A total symptom severity score (range - 0-80) can be obtained by summing the scores for each of the 20 items, with higher scores indicating worse outcomes.

Post-traumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI) (Tedeschi \& Calhoun, 1996; Spanish validation by Costa-Requena and Gil, 2007). It is a 21-item instrument based on a 6-point Likert scale (0=no change - 5=very high degree of change), which assesses positive changes experienced after a trauma. Total scores range from 0 to 105 with higher scores indicating better outcomes.

Working Alliance Inventory-Patient Version (WAI-P; Horvath, 1981; Horvath \& Greenberg, 1986, 1989; Spanish validation by Andrade-González \& Fernández-Liria, 2015). It consists of 36 items with seven possible response options (1 = never, 2 = rarely, 3 = occasionally, 4 = sometimes, 5 = often, 6 = very often, 7 = always). The scoring range of the overall WAI-P is 36-252 points with higher scores indicating better outcomes.

EuroQoL-EQ-5D-3L (EuroQol Group, 1990; Spanish validation by Abadia et al., 1999). It consists of 5 dimensions: mobility, self-care, usual activities, pain/discomfort and anxiety/depression. Each dimension has 5 levels: no problems, slight problems, moderate problems, severe problems and extreme problems. Total scores range from 0-100 with higher scores indicating better outcomes.

Total number of visits to each healthcare professional (oncologist, nursing staff, psychologist, psychiatrist, social worker, emergency department) (Electronic Health Record).

Adherence to Refills and Medications Scale (ARMS; Kripalani, Risser, Gatti, \& Jacobson, 2009; Spanish validation by Gonzalez-Bueno et al., 2017). It consists of 12 questions: 8 aimed at assessing the patient's ability to properly administer the medication and 4 regarding its correct intake based on a four-point Likert scale (range from 1=never to 4=always; total score range 12-48), with lower scores indicating better adherence.

Number of days of patients' sick leaves (Electronic Health Record).

Number of professionals involved in the online treatment or usual care as well as the number of professionals' working hours per week and costs (Electronic Health Record).

Costs per user and per month for the development and maintenance of the online platform (experimental group) and costs of hospital's infrastructure per face-to-face visits per user and month.

Cost estimate per patient using a specific transport according to mobility data in Catalonia area.

Study title	NCT ID	Conditions	Interventions	Eligibility	Organization	Link
Psychosocial eHealth in Advanced Lung Cancer	NCT05497973	Lung Cancer, No... Lung Cancer Non... Lung Cancer Non... Lung Cancer Sta... Lung Cancer	E-health ecosys... Usual psychosoc...	18 Years - 80 Years	Institut Català d'Oncologia
Online Psychosocial Cancer Screening, Monitoring and Stepped Treatment in Cancer Survivors	NCT04372459	Breast Cancer Psychological D... Emotional Disor...	Online integrat... Usual psychosoc...	18 Years - 85 Years	Institut Català d'Oncologia

Spots Global Cancer Trial Database for usual psychosocial care