Digitally enabled patient-centred survivorship care: from hype to implementation-aware impact.

Abstract

The prevalence of cancer survivorship is increasing worldwide, but survivorship care remains fragmented, inconsistent, and poorly aligned with the long-term needs of patients. Digitally enabled approaches could support more personalised, accessible, and scalable care by improving symptom monitoring, self-management, coordination, and patient engagement. However, despite encouraging results in select settings such as clinical trials, most digital interventions have not translated into routine practice or shown sustained impact at scale. In this Viewpoint, we examine current evidence on digitally enabled survivorship care and identify barriers to implementation, including inadequate personalisation, poor workflow integration, low engagement, uncertain sustainability, and insufficient attention to equity. We emphasise the need to align digital tools with heterogeneous survivorship trajectories, including differences in tumour type, treatment exposure, symptom burden, phase of follow-up, and care pathways. Future progress will need to move beyond standalone tools towards integrated, interoperable, hybrid models that combine digital innovation with appropriate human oversight and support within real-world care pathways for diverse populations.