MINI REVIEW article
Front. Oncol.
Sec. Radiation Oncology
Volume 15 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fonc.2025.1595975
The Risks of Telehealth in Radiation Oncology: Challenges and Mitigation Strategies
Provisionally accepted
- 1Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, Baton Rouge, United States
- 2The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, United States
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The integration of telehealth into radiation oncology represents a transformative evolution in healthcare delivery, offering enhanced patient accessibility, convenience, and improved multidisciplinary coordination. Telehealth supports a wide range of activities, including remote consultations, treatment planning discussions, on-treatment checks, toxicity management, and follow-up care. However, its successful adoption requires careful navigation of several substantial challenges. These include protecting sensitive patient data from cybersecurity threats, managing the limitations of remote clinical assessments, addressing technological disparities that contribute to the digital divide, and complying with a complex, evolving regulatory and reimbursement landscape. Additional concerns involve maintaining strong therapeutic relationships, integrating telehealth into existing clinical workflows, and ensuring ethical standards around equity and algorithmic bias.Although early concerns centered on misdiagnosis risks and reduced patient satisfaction, emerging evidence suggests that, when implemented thoughtfully, telehealth can maintain safety and quality of care in radiation oncology. This review analyzes the unique risks and challenges specific to our field and outlines evidence-based strategies to mitigate them. Key recommendations include the adoption of hybrid care models, investment in secure and user-friendly technology, development of standardized protocols, targeted staff training, and strong patient support mechanisms. A structured, continuous risk management framework is proposed to guide telehealth integration.By proactively addressing these challenges with approaches tailored to radiation oncology, practices can fully leverage the benefits of telehealth—ensuring patient safety, enhancing care quality, and expanding equitable access to treatment. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive roadmap for implementing and sustaining telehealth within the specialized context of radiation oncology.
Keywords: telehealth, Telemedicine, Radiation Oncology, risks, Challenges, Mitigation strategies, Patient Safety, cybersecurity
Received: 19 Mar 2025; Accepted: 06 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Stathakis, Papanikolaou, Ashford, Stephens and LaRose. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sotiri Stathakis, Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, Baton Rouge, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.