Family history and cancer risk study (FOREST): A clinical trial assessing electronic patient-directed family history input for identifying patients at risk of hereditary cancer.

Background: Hereditary cancer syndromes cause a high lifetime risk of early, aggressive cancers. Early recognition of individuals at risk can allow risk-reducing interventions that improve morbidity and mortality. Family health history applications that gather data directly from patients could alleviate barriers to risk assessment in the clinical appointment, such as lack of provider knowledge of genetics guidelines and limited time in the clinical appointment. New approaches allow linking these applications to patient health portals and their electronic health records (EHRs), offering an end-to-end solution for patient-input family history information and risk result clinical decision support for their provider.

Methods: We describe the design of the first large-scale evaluation of an EHR-integrable, patient-facing family history software platform based on the Substitutable Medical Applications and Reusable Technologies on Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (SMART on FHIR) standard. In our study, we leverage an established implementation science framework to evaluate the success of our model to facilitate scalable, systematic risk assessment for hereditary cancers in diverse clinical environments in a large pragmatic study at two sites. We will also evaluate the success of the approach to improve the efficiency of downstream genetic counseling resulting from pre-counseling pedigree generation.

Conclusions: Our research study will provide evidence regarding a new care delivery model that is scalable and sustainable for a variety of medical centers and clinics.

Trial registration: This study was registered on ClinicalTrials.gov under NCT05079334 on 15 October 2021.