Evaluating financial toxicity (FT) interventions.

e21673 Background: FT has been defined as an adverse event of cancer treatments. Several patient (pt)-level interventions have been developed to mitigate FT. However, due to the lack of longitudinal studies, the impact of these interventions has not been established. Methods: Pts with cancer receiving Co-Pay Assistance (CPA) from the Patient Access Network Foundation were approached at baseline, 1 and 3 months post-CPA. We assessed the use of pt navigators, social workers, financial counselors, support groups, and transportation vouchers by pts. The outcomes were improvements in disease-specific HRQoL measures, global HRQoL measure (FACTG, lower values are worse) and improvement in FT, as measured by the COST (lower values are worse). Multivariable regression was used to identify whether these interventions were associated with the outcomes. Results: 308 pts with cancer were assessed at baseline (prior to CPA) and at 1 and 3 months after. 275 pts (89%) had an improvement in their FT over 3 months. A majority of these pts had multiple myeloma (MM, 86 pts, 28%). Navigators were used by 179 pts (42%), social workers by 106 (34%), financial counselors by 107 (35%), support groups by 94 (31%), and transportation vouchers by 50 (16%). None of these interventions increased the odds of FT or HRQoL improvement at the 0.05 significance level. Conclusions: The selected population of cancer pts who received CPA for their treatments had a significant improvement in FT over time. Yet, this improvement was not associated with additional interventions, suggesting CPA as the main intervention. The FT improvement was not clearly translated into significant HRQoL improvements, likely due to the multidimensional HRQoL construct (which includes other symptoms) versus the unidimensional aspect of a financial event. [Table: see text]