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

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).