Create your Personal Health Record and unlock support built around you

  • Treatments and trials you qualify for
  • Education for your stage of care
  • Financial support for your medications
  • Solutions to your side effects
Learn more about HealthTree
Video

Real-Time Symptom Tracking for Myeloma Patients | James Berenson, MD

Posted by
HealthTree Logo HealthTree
• December 20, 2025

Description

James Berenson, MD, shares results from the mQOL Platform Feasibility Study, a new approach designed to better capture the real experiences of people living with multiple myeloma. Using simple text messages on their phones, patients reported symptoms and quality of life in real time—allowing care teams to respond quickly when problems arose. The study showed high patient participation, meaningful clinical insights, and the ability to address issues between clinic visits, offering a more patient-centered way to improve outcomes and quality of

Transcript

I'm Jim Berenson, and I'm the president of the Berenson Cancer Center, and also the CEO and founder of the Institute for Myeloma and Bone Cancer Research in West Hollywood, California. My pleasure today is to present the results of our patient-reported outcome, called the mQOL Platform Feasibility Study.

This study was conducted among our patients in clinic, including those with relapsed refractory, newly diagnosed, and those in maintenance therapy. We know that patient-reported outcomes today are inadequate—they don't truly capture the patient experience. Now, for the first time, we have an outcome measurement that gives us the patient experience in real time. This has important implications because we can engage patients rapidly if something is going awry, and we also get much more real data about what happens “between the notes,” between visits, which is missed with current patient-reported outcome measurements.

In this study, we engaged 58 patients who, using simply their cell phone, texted us daily for the first month if they were on frontline or active treatment for relapsed refractory disease. Patients on maintenance therapy were contacted weekly thereafter.

We looked at 7 or 8 common symptoms experienced by myeloma patients, as well as ten measurements of quality of life, scored from 1 to 4 using the EORTC measurement. Impressively, 85% of these patients, with a median age of 68, engaged and completed the assessments.

We learned that many patients were experiencing a lot of clinically significant events—in this 12-week study among 58 patients, there were 219 actual events. Because these texts came directly to our portal, we could get a hold of the patient, act on it, and hopefully improve outcomes.

The assessments only take three minutes, whereas conventional ones take much longer and are often never completed. We believe this new platform, mQOL, will help provide more frequent monitoring of patients, improve their outcomes, and give us real data on what really happens between visits.

Thank you.

If our videos have helped you in any way and you're able to, please consider making a donation to help us continue this important work. Your gift will go three times as far when we reach $500,000 by the end of the year. Every contribution, big or small, makes a difference, and we're deeply grateful for your support.

Related Content