We are increasingly recognizing that personalized advanced and chronic illness care requires meticulous assessment and management of supportive care needs across the entire disease trajectory. This requires drawing clinical decisions from a research evidence base that is presumably generalizable to a heterogeneous patient population, often with poor performance status, multi-morbidity, and a large symptom distress profile. As sometimes this is not the case, how do we improve evidence generation that can be consistently applied to all patients with advanced disease?
Keywords: Palliative care; cancer; clinical trials.