RapidEval Chemotoxicity Project Comes to a Close

One of RapidEval’s earliest accepted projects recently came to a close. Led by Dr. Arjun Gupta, the goal of this intervention was to reduce chemotherapy toxicity in older cancer patients.

Dr. Gupta and his team created an electronic health record alert that notifies oncologists when a new patient is at risk for chemotherapy toxicity. The alert links to a tool that calculates the patient’s individual risk of having harmful side effects from chemotherapy.

Adoption of the tool was low, making it difficult to assess if the intervention had any impact on patient outcomes. However, this project led to valuable insights on the factors that contributed to low adoption.

Through interviews with M Health Fairview providers, the study team found that barriers to use included difficulty interpreting the tool’s results, a need for more information for certain treatment regiments, and the fact that the tool was not applicable to every patient.

These findings can inform health systems who want to implement chemotoxicity tools, and highlight the importance of evaluating implementation outcomes, such as end-users’ perceptions of acceptability and feasibility of an intervention, when examining the implementation of any new initiative.