Many health care services provided in the hospital can be safely delivered in the privacy of a patient’s home.¹ This includes the administration of medications used to treat cancer. ^1-5

Cancer therapy administration was initiated in the hospital because of the need for close monitoring and toxicity management.¹ As the understanding of early side effect management increased and the requirement to decrease hospital stay grew, cancer therapy transitioned from the hospital to the outpatient setting, and over the last twenty years, has increasingly shifted into the patient’s home.^1-2  The COVID-19 pandemic and the health care ecosystem have created the drive to alternative sites of care.^1-9 Considerations for transition to home include care coordination, patient tolerability of initial doses and availability of trained staff.

In May 2023, the FDA released a draft guidance for “Decentralized Clinical Trials for Drugs, Biological Products, and Devices,” which was created to increase clinical trial accrual and facilitate the movement of some or all clinical trial components to alternate locations including participant’s home.⁶ Using telehealth and digital health technologies to decrease in-person visits to clinical trial sites, we may see enhanced trial participation, decreased caregiver burden and facilitation of research in rare diseases to increase recruitment, enrollment, and retention of a meaningfully diverse clinical population. This translates to less time and funding wasted.