Grant: Catalyst Grant: Personalized Health Catalyst Grants

Patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer often need to make important decisions regarding their care soon after their diagnosis. Research has shown that these patients are often not aware of all treatment options available to them or how treatment decisions will impact their length of life, health care needs, quality of life, place of care and chance of dying at home. Using information from Ontario healthcare databases, we will study the experience of patients with pancreatic cancer with the goal of developing a set of accurate predictive algorithms, RESPECT Pancreatic Cancer Care, describing how various treatments influence patient survival, health care experiences and quality of life. In the future, these algorithms will be applied to creating an online patient-centered interactive decision support calculator that provides personalized health assessment and risk estimation. We believe that the algorithms developed in this study and the corresponding decision-support tool will help to personalize the care of patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer by: increasing patient participation in the decision-making process; providing patients with information from different treatment perspectives; offering both patients and care providers insight into the multiple ways that treatments can influence patients' survival, healthcare experience and quality of life; helping to identify which patients will benefit the most from surgical and medical care. Successful development of the RESPECT Pancreatic Cancer Care algorithms and calculator will allow us to expand our research program to other highly aggressive cancers of the gastrointestinal system.