Expanding Access to Palliative Care and Psycho-Oncology with Telehealth Group Visits

For patients with advanced cancer, services such as palliative care, psycho-oncology, and integrative oncology can address many common symptoms and improve quality of life. Even though these services improve outcomes, access to them is limited in many health systems.

In this presentation, Drs. Stephanie Cheng and Neha G. Goyal will describe how telehealth group medical visits (“group visits”) are a potential answer to expand access to these services. Group visits combine medical care, health education, and peer support.

Typically, these visits include didactic content, time for patient questions, group discussion, and individual consultations. Focusing on patients with cancer, Drs. Cheng and Goyal will discuss principles and practices of group visits. Note that these learnings can be used to create groups for other populations and serious illnesses (e.g., heart failure, chronic lung disease, kidney disease, liver failure, and neurological conditions).