The National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, will award $23 million to four academic institutions to establish centers of excellence that will conduct research on the role of telehealth in delivering cancer-related health care, a practice that became more prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The awards will establish NCI’s Telehealth Research Centers of Excellence (TRACE) initiative, which is being supported by the Cancer MoonshotSM, a White House initiative first launched in 2016 and reignited by President Biden in 2022(link is external) to accelerate the rate of progress against cancer. The awards are to be distributed over five years, pending availability of funds…
“These centers will address important gaps in telehealth and cancer-related care delivery,” said Robin C. Vanderpool, Dr.P.H., chief of the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch in DCCPS. “We need to establish an evidence base for using this technology to deliver health care in oncology and make it part of routine care. In addition, these centers will explore opportunities for scalability and dissemination of their cancer-related telehealth interventions beyond their own health systems.”
The research being undertaken by the four centers will study the role of telehealth in fields from prevention to screening, diagnosis to treatment, and survivorship. Each center will be led by an academic institution that has assembled diverse teams of researchers to conduct large trials in real-world clinical settings such as hospitals, cancer centers, oncology practices, and primary care offices… Read the full release here.
