Home or Away from Home: A Multi-Institution Study Comparing Medical Outcomes, Patient Perspectives, and Health-Related Quality of Life for Outpatient Versus Inpatient Management after Chemotherapy for Pediatric Acute Myeloid Leukemia

INTRODUCTION Pediatric acute myeloid leukemia (AML) requires intensive chemotherapy that results in prolonged periods of neutropenia, placing patients at significant risk for life threatening infection. Current supportive care guidelines strongly recommend hospitalization after chemotherapy completion until neutrophil recovery. While approximately 70% of United States (US) centers adhere to this recommendation, there are little data to support inpatient over outpatient management. Therefore, we compared clinical outcomes (Aim 1), patient experiences (Aim 2), and patient quality of life (QoL) (Aim 3), between the two strategies in a nationally representative sample of newly diagnosed AML patients