Cancer Care Closer to Home

For people with cancer who live in the vast Mountain West, care is often located far from home. Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah serves a 524,000-square-mile region spanning Utah, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming, 93 percent of which is considered rural or frontier.

“People who live in urban areas shouldn’t be the only benefactors of the advances in cancer care,” says Kathi Mooney PhD’85, Huntsman Cancer Institute researcher and Distinguished Professor of Nursing at the U. With decreased access to early-detection screenings and cutting-edge clinical trials, rural cancer patients are 10 percent more likely to die from the disease than their urban peers.

To close that gap, Mooney is leading a five-year project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health’s PARADIGM program. The project builds on the Huntsman at Home initiative, which provides urgent care to cancer patients in their homes, treating symptoms like dehydration or infection to help avoid hospital visits. A study led by Mooney showed Huntsman at Home participants had 48 percent fewer ER visits and were 58 percent less likely to be admitted for unplanned hospital stays.

Huntsman at Home has already expanded to Utah’s Grand, Emery, and Carbon counties. The new PARADIGM initiative will add a mobile medical unit equipped with diagnostic imaging like ultrasound, X-ray, EKG, and blood testing equipment, as well as two treatment chairs so some chemotherapy and immunotherapy infusions can be given in the rural communities where patients live. The vehicle will also be used to offer select clinical trials to rural participants.

As part of the program, Mooney and her team—including co-principal investigator Theresa Werner, Huntsman Cancer Institute deputy director and professor of medicine in the Oncology Division at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine—will conduct a clinical effectiveness study to monitor care outcomes, patient satisfaction, and cost-effectiveness.

“If we are committed to reaching all patients with cancer in the areas we serve, we have to develop models of care that actually make it possible,” says Mooney. “Our commitment is to solve the access issues that distance from Huntsman Cancer Institute creates—and demonstrate how distributed cancer care can be sustainable and scalable across this five-state area.”