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PHILADELPHIA—Recognizing that there were plenty of resources for cancer patients but few for cancer survivors, specialists at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania launched OncoLife, an online tool to help people understand how their treatments would effect their health and define a plan of action once they stopped treatment.
“The good news for cancer survivors is that their numbers are growing,” says Dr. James Metz, radiation oncologist and system editor. “Unfortunately, cancer treatments are not without consequences and many of these survivors are dealing with the long-term effects of treatments with little or no guidance.”
OncoLife requires patients to answer a few simple questions about their demographics and aspects of their disease (e.g., type of cancer, drugs, radiation therapy, etc.) and provides them with a personalized long-term survivorship plan for free. Patients are then encouraged to share the plan with their healthcare team and family.
“As more and more questions about long-term survivorship came flooding in, we realized how many people didn’t have reliable healthcare resources to help them chart a survivorship plan,” says Carolyn Vachani, oncology nurse educator and OncoLife creator. “We knew we had to help and we knew we had to create a plan that anyone could access.”
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