Jennifer Steel
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
More than 18 million Americans are living with cancer, and about half report serious depression, pain, or fatigue — the three symptoms an NIH consensus statement identifies as the most common and most distressing in cancer care. These symptoms do more than make people feel worse: they are linked to lower quality of life, poorer adherence to cancer treatment, more unplanned hospital and emergency visits, higher costs, and shorter survival.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
- Topics
cancer survivorship
depression
cancer pain
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2029
What they work on
- Evaluate whether CARES, an electronic health record-based screening and stepped collaborative care intervention, improves patient-centered outcomes such as health-related quality of life, in a cluster randomized trial of more than 34 outpatient oncology clinics.
- Conduct an implementation-focused process evaluation guided by the RE-AIM framework, identifying patient, clinician and organizational facilitators and barriers to engaging with CARES in routine cancer care.
- Examine the net costs and cost-effectiveness of CARES compared with standard care, building the economic case needed to disseminate the program beyond the trial site.
- Use artificial intelligence to monitor fidelity of the CARES intervention, verifying that screening and stepped collaborative care are delivered as designed across participating clinics.
More about the research
Many cancer centers have successfully set up routine screening for these symptoms, but screening alone has not fixed the problem, because only a small fraction of patients who screen positive and get referred actually start treatment. This project addresses that gap between detection and care.
Why it matters
Cancer centers already screen for depression, pain and fatigue, but most patients who screen positive never start treatment. If CARES proves effective and cost-effective in ordinary oncology clinics, it could change how screening and symptom treatment are delivered nationwide, benefiting people living with cancer through better quality of life and potentially fewer emergency visits and readmissions, while giving health systems cost data to justify the change.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Katherine Courtright
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether an automated needs-based palliative care trigger in the electronic health record increases hospital-free days and palliative consults compared with usual care, in a cluster-randomized trial of over 64,000 patients at 9 hospitals.
Ravi Parikh
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test in a randomized trial whether A-PACT, machine learning risk prediction paired with lay health worker phone outreach, reduces hospitalizations and intensive end-of-life care for patients with cancer.
Kathryn Taylor
Georgetown University, DC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Compare electronic quitline referral against a centralized health-system phone counseling plus nicotine replacement program for lung screening patients, measuring biologically verified quitting at 3 and 6 months.
The school
University of Pittsburgh: 83 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
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