The MATCHES (Making Telehealth Delivery of Cancer Care at Home Effective and Safe) Telehealth Research Center aims to build the evidence base necessary to establish best practices for telehealth-enabled cancer care. The overarching goal of the Center is to create a research hub that generates evidence, trains investigators, and develops the research methods required to ignite the field of precision cancer care delivery. We aim to develop a new paradigm in oncology—precision delivery—with the ultimate goal of matching individual patients with the most beneficial combination of clinic-based or telehealth-supported home-setting care.
Our specific aims are:
- Conduct impactful pragmatic trials of telehealth in oncology
- Analyze a large existing cache of multidimensional observational data characterizing telehealth utilization and outcomes
- Train investigators and equip them with the skills necessary to innovate within an evidence-based framework
- Integrate telehealth with other data streams and create and apply analytic methods to transform the field of precision care delivery
MATCHES is a part of the National Cancer Institute’s TRACE (Telehealth Research Centers of Excellence) initiative under the White House Cancer Moonshot. Funded by NCI grant #P50CA271357
- August 2024 Cure “How Patients With Cancer Can Prepare for Virtual Care Visits”
- June 2024 MSK “Cancer Care at Home: MSK Advances Lead the Field”
- May 2024 MSK “How MSK is Making Patient Care More Accessible”
- January 2023 Healio “NCI-funded centers study new ways to apply telehealth across cancer care”
- August 2022 Forbes “Telehealth for Cancer Care Receives $23 Million Research Funding Boost”
- August 2022 Health Leaders “NIH Announces 4 Telehealth Research Centers of Excellence for Cancer Care”
- August 2022 Inside Precision Medicine “NCI Funds Four NewCancer Telehealth Research Centers of Excellence”
- August 2022 NCI Press Release “NCI Awards $23 million to establish centers of excellence to study telehealth for cancer care”
Please contact matches@mskcc.org to be added to our PDL for seminar announcements.
| Dr. Thomas Roberts | Home Hospital for Cancer Patients | 8/5/25
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| Dr. Jorge Nieva | Telemedicine for Immunotherapy at Home | 6/24/25 |
| Dr. Heather Landau | BMT at Home | 3/18/25 |
| Andrew Hantel MD | Climate Impact of Tele-Oncology | 10/22/24
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| Roxana Dronca MD | Cancer Care Beyond Walls | 7/16/24 |
| Manali I. Patel MD MPH | Profit Over People, Cost over Care: Partnering to Disrupt the Broken Health Care System for People with Cancer | 5/3/24 |
| Jonas Paludo MD | Remote Patient Monitoring and Outpatient Management of Cellular Therapies | 3/12/24 |
| Olga Perski PhD | Evaluating engagement with digital health interventions and the engagement crisis | 11/28/23 |
| Adrian Aguilera, PhD | Digital Health Equity and Access | 10/17/23 |
| Shaalan Beg, MD, MS | Employing tele-oncology to improve access to clinical trials | 9/12/23 |
| Kathi Mooney, PhD, RN | Use of tele-oncology in hospital at home models | 7/11/23 |
| Amy I. Laughlin, MD, MSHP | Building and rapidly scaling oncology treatment at home during the COVID pandemic | 5/23/23
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MATCH-UP: Making Telehealth Delivery of Cancer Care at Home Effective and Safe- Upscaled Services Protocol
Status: Open to accrual
Lead(s): Erin Bange, MD, Michael Morris, MD
Summary: This pragmatic trial will test a new solution for a major problem with telehealth—the continued centrality of the cancer center for even the most routine clinical needs. We hypothesize that our telehealth model, forged in the crisis setting of the COVID-19 pandemic, can be enhanced and expanded to better meet patients’ and clinicians’ needs through a new program, Enhanced Telemedicine, in which cancer care becomes increasingly home based. Enhanced telemedicine is a complex, multi-component intervention, with a telehealth backbone plus at-home administration of treatments and laboratory assessments. This cluster randomized controlled trial will evaluate Ehanced telmedicine versus usual care for patients with breast or prostate cancer in MSK’s network of outpatient practices.
MATCH-Novel Pilot: Making Telehealth Delivery of Cancer Care at Home Effective and Safe for Novel Therapies
Status: Open to accrual
Lead(s): Bobby Daly, MD
Summary: Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is the most aggressive form of lung cancer with a median overall survival of just over 1 year and limited second line treatments for patients with advanced disease. Tarlatamab, a bispecific T-cell engager (BiTE) is a promising new immunotherapeutic approach. BiTE therapies have toxicity concerns related to cytokine release syndrome (CRS) and neurologic toxicity (including ICANS) requiring hospitalization for the first cycle of treatment. MATCH-Novel aims to investigate the use of a “Hospital at Home” (HaH) model with an enhanced telemedicine platform to improve access to this emerging therapy. The intervention will consist of coordinating a thoracic oncology telemedicine visit, at home paramedic visits, and vital sign and lab testing at home, to monitor for toxicity concerns within the first 24 hours post-infusion.
Status: Closed to accrual
Lead: Bobby Daly MD
Summary: MATCH-IO extends the Enhanced Telemedicine program to patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who are receiving immunotherapy. The overarching goal of this pilot study is to improve the cancer care experience for patients receiving immunotherapy and for clinical teams by transitioning some components of treatment monitoring to patients’ homes. MATCH-IO will test whether in-person visits for ICB therapy q6wk (rather than q3wk), with interim telehealth toxicity checks between in-person treatments, is safe and effective relative to the standard q3wk infusions at in-person visits.
Status: Active
Lead: Kathy Panageas
Summary: The MATCHES (Making Telehealth Delivery of Cancer Care at Home Effective and Safe) Telehealth Research Center will perform integration and pre-processing of complex synchronous and asynchronous data, data harmonization for telehealth evaluation and development of novel research methods. The overall goal of the Center is to optimize and personalize telehealth care delivery for cancer patients and survivors by deploying a novel intervention for cancer care delivery at home. The major tasks of this retrospective protocol are to 1) synthesize complex multimodal, multilayer asynchronous and synchronous data from trial data and MSK-wide data; 2) develop common data elements and facilitate data sharing across the Center; 3) track, manage, and analyze data on processes and outcomes of telehealth implementation, as well as clinical-effectiveness outcomes; 4) perform quality-control and coordination of all data use; 5) develop an analytic pipeline for digital biomarker discovery.
Aims:
- To assemble an observational database by integrating synchronous and asynchronous data for the development of research methods in telehealth.
- To develop an analytic pipeline for digital biomarker discovery.
- To explore patterns of telehealth use by patient, clinician, and clinic site factors.
- To explore the effect of telehealth on key clinical outcomes such as overall survival, health care utilization, quality of life, and safety
Clustering-Informed Shared-Structure Variational Autoencoder for Missing Data Imputation in Large-Scale Healthcare Data
Leads: Yuan Chen, Yasin Charvadeh Khadem
Summary: Despite advancements in managing healthcare data, missing data challenges persist in Electronic Health Records (EHR) and patient-reported health data, compromising their usability in various healthcare analytics. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) modeling techniques evolve, conventional and contemporary methods for handling missing data encounter notable limitations that hinder their effectiveness. Established methods such as Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE), MissForest, and Generative Adversarial Imputation Nets (GAIN) demonstrate limitations in handling the complexities inherent in healthcare data. These challenges involve capturing complex non-linear relationships, extended computation times, and constraints in addressing various types of missing data mechanisms. In response, we propose a novel model building on the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) architecture, a powerful generative model using Bayesian neural networks. Our proposed method differs from existing VAE-based imputation strategies by providing a robust framework specifically designed for handling missing values within healthcare data. This framework can effectively accommodate various missing data mechanisms, including missing not at random (MNAR). By identifying missing data patterns and leveraging shared structures across VAEs for different patterns, our model effectively captures complex associations, thus enhancing generalizability and learning efficiency. Through comprehensive simulation studies, we showcase the adaptability of our approach across different missing mechanisms, demonstrating its superiority over traditional and popular imputation methods in terms of imputation accuracy. We apply our proposed method to EHR data from patients diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer who are at high risk of recurrence after surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, specifically among those treated with the FDA-approved drug abemaciclib, which necessitates routine blood monitoring at specific time intervals due to potential side effects. Given the variability in clinical practices for ordering these tests, our approach aims to mitigate the impact of missing data on patient health monitoring and subsequent analyses.
Aims:
- The deliverables of this supplement will be multiply-imputed data sets that are ready for ML/AI applications as well as analysis pipelines that will be shared following the data sharing plans of MATCHES. We also anticipate the methods and algorithms developed during the course of this supplement will be helpful for others who deal with missing data in large-scale healthcare datasets.
May 2025
Opportunities for Home Cancer Care: The Final Frontier
March 2025
Cancer Patient Perspectives on Clinical Trial Discussion and Informed Consent through Telemedicine
December 2024
Feasibility and Acceptability of Home Phlebotomy for Patients with Cancer
November 2024
Perspectives on Telemedicine Visits Reported by Patients with Cancer
July 2024
Transforming Patient-Centered Cancer Care Using Telehealth: The MATCHES Center
July 2024
A Framework for Integrating Telehealth Equitably (FITE) Across the Cancer Care Continuum
May 2024
Digitally Enabled Transitional Care Management in Oncology
April 2024
Remote Monitoring and Data Collection for Decentralized Clinical Trials
February 2024
Telemedicine and Cancer Care: Barriers and Strategies to Optimize Delivery
October 2023
Persistence of Telemedicine Usage for Breast and Prostate Cancer after the Peak of the COVID-19 Pandemic
September 2023
Honing in on the Hospital-at-Home Model
June 2023
Telemedicine as patient-centered oncology care: Will we embrace or resist disruption?
April 2022
Reimagining patient-centric cancer clinical trials: a multi-stakeholder international coalition
Telehealth Visits
At-Home Vital Sign Monitoring
Self Administration of Injection Medications
Center Leadership
Members
Fernanda C. G. Polubriaginof, MD, PhD
Heidi Sadowsky BSN, RN
Fellows
Yasin Khadem Charvadeh, PhD, Biostatistics
Staff
Jennie Huang, Project Manager, MATCH-Novel
Kat Marcinkowski, Research Project Associate, MATCH-UP
Andrea D’Agostino, Senior Project Coordinator, MATCH-IO
Advisory Board
Jessie Holland, MSN
Devika Gajria, MD
Scott Freeswick PharmD, MS
Melissa Lee-Teh, PharmD
Chasity Walters, MSN, PhD
Monika Shah, MD
Carol L. Brown, MD
Ankit Chabra
Jennifer Tota
Carol Cincotta