Screening for Financial Toxicity in Oncology Research and Practice: A Narrative Review.

Abstract

Financial toxicity (FT) is now a well-recognized issue affecting many patients with cancer and their families. The field is rapidly moving from a focus on describing this problem to efforts to optimize screening and identify management solutions. There are now multiple validated tools to study FT in the research setting. Although there is currently no standard tool for screening in the setting of routine clinical practice, many of the scales for FT were developed with clinical screening in mind, and there is emerging evidence regarding potential to screen with one or two questions to detect financial distress. This narrative review is intended to provide an update on validated scales that have been used to study FT in the research context and provide examples of tools of varying length that are being studied for implementation of screening in clinical practice. It is important for clinicians to seek to identify and assist patients who may be experiencing FT as a result of cancer or cancer therapy.