Key Takeaways

• Emerging technologies highlighted during and beyond the 2026 ASCO Annual Meeting are enabling oncology APPs to deliver more continuous, proactive care through electronic patient-reported outcomes, remote monitoring, and digital communication tools.
• APPs play a central role in translating digital data into clinical action by managing symptom alerts, coordinating care, educating patients, and ensuring technology is implemented in ways that improve clinical workflows.
• Successful adoption of digital health and AI requires validated tools, clearly defined clinical workflows, equitable patient access, and a continued focus on improving meaningful patient outcomes rather than simply adding new technology.

Jasmin Hundal, MD, DipABLM, MS, MPH, discusses how themes reinforced at the 2026 ASCO Annual Meeting are accelerating the use of digital health technologies that are reshaping oncology practice for advanced practice providers (APPs). She highlights the growing role of electronic patient-reported outcomes, remote monitoring, wearable devices, patient portals, telehealth, and AI-enabled clinical tools in shifting cancer care from episodic visits to continuous patient management. Hundal emphasizes that APPs are uniquely positioned to translate digital information into timely clinical action through symptom triage, patient education, care coordination, and technology implementation while ensuring equitable access and sustainable workflows. She concludes that thoughtfully implemented digital technologies have the potential to improve early toxicity detection, personalize care, reduce clinician burden, and strengthen—not replace—the patient-clinician relationship.

Transcript

Hello, everyone. My name is Jasmin Hundal. I’m a graduating fellow from Cleveland Clinic and incoming faculty at Emory University as a breast medical oncologist.

Beyond AI, the technologies that have the biggest impact on oncology care today include electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePROs), remote monitoring, wearable devices, patient portals, telehealth, digital pathology, and electronic clinical trial platforms. Together, these technologies are shifting oncology from episodic, visit-based care toward more continuous care. We now collect symptoms between visits, monitor function over time, share expertise across different locations, and potentially detect treatment toxicity or disease progression earlier.

The APP’s role has expanded from primarily assessing patients during scheduled encounters to integrating continuous streams of information between visits. APPs are increasingly receiving portal messages, ePROs, laboratory trends, and automated alerts. This makes APPs central not only to clinical care, but also to digital triage, patient education, care coordination, and technology implementation. APPs are often the people translating the clinical or technology signals they receive from the electronic health record into actual clinical action.

Remote monitoring and digital symptom reporting are especially important between visits. Continuous symptom reporting can identify worsening pain, nausea, fatigue, and other toxicities while there is still an opportunity to intervene. Randomized studies have shown that patient-reported outcomes improve quality of care and other clinical outcomes when symptom reporting prompts timely clinical responses.

Wearable technology provides information on activity, sleep, heart rate, and functional recovery. Most of these technologies have been studied in clinical trials and have not yet been widely implemented into day-to-day care, but they are promising because they may identify declining performance status, treatment intolerance, and early toxicities.

Patient portals allow patients to report symptoms, receive instructions, review results, and communicate with the care team asynchronously. The challenge is ensuring that portal access does not create false expectations that every message is monitored continuously or replace the need for urgent evaluation when appropriate.

One of the clearest improvements is the period between visits. Rather than waiting until the next appointment to ask, “How did the last cycle go?” the care team can receive symptom information while the patient is actually experiencing the problem. Visit summaries, portal messaging, educational materials, and electronic symptom questionnaires can reinforce information that may have been difficult to absorb during a stressful consultation. However, patients need to know who reviews the information, how quickly the team will respond, and what to do if symptoms become urgent before receiving a response.

The greatest near-term opportunities with AI include documentation support, automated visit summaries, inbox triage, shared remote monitoring dashboards, electronic health record-integrated treatment pathways, automated extraction of relevant clinical information, and clinical trial prescreening. These technologies can reduce repetitive documentation, improve handoffs, and help prioritize patients who need immediate attention.

Technology also has the potential to reduce burnout, but only when it removes work. Sometimes it can add additional work. If it generates poorly prioritized alerts or creates multiple dashboards that must be checked, it may simply redistribute the burden.

The barriers are frequently operational rather than technological. They include poor interoperability within electronic health records, upfront and ongoing costs, inadequate staffing for monitoring and escalation, alert fatigue, workflow disruption, privacy and medicolegal concerns, limited reimbursement, clinician training and readiness, variable patient engagement, and uncertainty about effectiveness across different patient populations.

Successful implementation requires more than purchasing a platform. Practices need to define ownership, establish response time and escalation protocols, implement quality monitoring, develop downtime plans, and create sustainable staffing models.

Digital care should always include a nondigital pathway. Practices can offer telephone reporting, paper instructions, loaner devices, offline-capable tools, language-concordant materials, and support from navigators and community health workers. Onboarding should include teach-back demonstrations rather than simply giving the patient an app.

Practices should monitor who enrolls, who remains engaged, who generates incomplete data, and who experiences delays. These outcomes should be examined by language, age, race, ethnicity, rurality, insurance status, and geographic location. Equity cannot be assumed simply because technology is broadly available. Equity is essential to converting technology from a product into a care program.

APPs can explain why these tools are being used, demonstrate how and when to report symptoms, establish expectations about response times, provide instructions for urgent symptoms, and identify language, disability, or access barriers. They can also review alerts, escalate concerns, recognize when technology is failing, and develop alternative workflows when digital participation is not feasible.

Because APPs understand both clinical workflow and the patient experience, they should be involved in selecting, testing, and evaluating these technologies—not just using them after implementation.

The biggest impact AI will have is integrating electronic symptoms, ePROs, wearable data, laboratory results, imaging, pathology, genomics, and circulating tumor DNA into a longitudinal care platform. This could support earlier identification of toxicity and functional decline, more personalized treatment surveillance, ctDNA-informed decision-making, AI-assisted imaging and digital pathology, and multimodal risk assessment and treatment response models.

AI may also enable more decentralized clinical trials, remote follow-up, and patient-facing tools for education, translation, and navigation. The long-term vision is a continuously updated model of the patient rather than a series of disconnected clinical snapshots. However, the value of these innovations depends on prospective validation and the ability to improve meaningful clinical outcomes.

APPs should focus less on learning every new platform and more on understanding how to evaluate technology. Key questions include: Does it solve a meaningful clinical problem? Does it add burden or reduce it? Does it integrate into the existing workflow? Who monitors the data and acts on the alerts? Has it been validated in the population being served? How are privacy and accountability handled? Are certain patients being excluded? Are patient-centered outcomes and clinical outcomes actually improving, or is the technology simply adding another layer?

Skills in digital literacy, remote triage, workflow design, patient onboarding, data interpretation, and quality improvement will become increasingly important, so APPs should remain aware of these advances.

The greatest opportunity is to use technology to make oncology care more continuous and more personalized rather than more distant. As clinicians and APPs, we can lead the transition from discovering symptoms at the next appointment to identifying and addressing them when they occur. Technology can extend the reach of the care team into the hours and days between visits and, when implemented successfully, strengthen our relationships with patients, support clinical judgment, and improve patient care.