Optimizing Patient-Reported Outcomes in Myeloma Care Through mQOL

The introduction of the real-time, text-based monitoring of symptoms and quality of life (mQOL) platform into clinical practice may provide an efficient method for collecting patient-reported outcome (PRO) data among patients with newly diagnosed or relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma and beyond, according to James Berenson, MD.

In an interview with CancerNetwork^®, Berenson, founder, medical and scientific director, president, and chief executive officer of the Institute for Myeloma and Bone Cancer Research, and president and medical director at Berenson Cancer Center, discussed the potential impact of the mQOL platform on PROs in clinical practice. The discussion was contextualized by findings from the prospective, observational MQ-mQOL-001 study presented at the 2025 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition.

Initially, Berenson explained that the trial conducted was a feasibility study, although some data populating the mQOL platform appeared clinically significant. He also suggested that through its use, patients may more effectively inform clinicians of symptoms that can be addressed more expediently than without it. He concluded by expressing that the platform itself is quick, has a high completion rate, and may provide more accurate and disease-specific data vs other QOL measurements.

Transcript:

How can members across a multidisciplinary team optimize their use of mQOL to enhance patient care?

At this point [for] mQOL, we just did a feasibility study, but the sky’s the limit. This communication, which we get from the patient into our portal, comes through our nurses and then their assessments, [and] if they think they are clinically significant, they come to me. It’s a work in progress; we can optimize the provision of data to [clinicians] more efficiently from that patient, and that will allow it to be done more quickly and more efficiently. Then, [we] also [need] to figure out how to get it back to the patient, if we need to say, “Hey, that’s important, we have got to deal with that problem right now.” They may not think it’s important, but I see it and I go, “We [have] to act on that.”

For clinicians, what advantages might mQOL offer over other methods of tracking and acting upon patient-reported symptoms?

The advantage of this [is that] it is 3 minutes in assessment. Whether patients are 47 or 91, it’s an [approximately] 85% completion rate; it’s easy to do. The data come in rapidly. It’s clean. It’s clear. It’s scored 1 to 4. One: I do not have any symptoms; [to] 4: it’s really bad. We can get data quickly and easily, and instead of taking an hour to do these systems, it’s a couple minutes. It goes right to us efficiently through this text message into our portal. It’s cool, quick, [and] efficient. That’s not true of the other measurements that people do. They are cumbersome, not very accurate, not disease specific, or generic. This had a lot of advantages.

Reference

Berenson J, Swift R, Tellez V, et al. Transforming patient outcomes in multiple myeloma through real-time, text-based monitoring of symptoms (Sxs) and quality of life (QoL): results from the mqol feasibility study. Blood. 2025;146(suppl 1):406. doi:10.1182/blood-2025-406