The Intersecting Time, Administrative and Financial Burdens of a Cancer Diagnosis

Cancer and its care create substantial financial, time, and administrative burdens both for patients and their loved ones. While cancer-related financial burdens have been well documented in the past decade, time and administrative burdens of cancer care have received substantially less attention. We define time burdens as the burden patients and caregivers experience due to the time needed to complete cancer-related treatment and tasks that take away from other life responsibilities. Relatedly, we conceptualize administrative burdens as those burdens patients and caregivers experience due to cancer-related, resource-consuming bureaucratic and logistical tasks. Finally, financial hardship can be conceptualized as problems patients experience related to the cost of medical care. These burdens do not exist in isolation; time, administrative, and financial burdens intersect with and compound each other. Currently, we have limited evidence-based measures on the objective (e.g., scheduling time, transportation, wait time) and subjective (e.g., mental, emotional and physical stress) measures of time and administrative burden. We have even more limited evidence of the risk factors for and outcomes from increased time and administrative burdens, and how they differentially impact populations across social and demographic groups. In this commentary, we present a research agenda to map, measure, evaluate, and mitigate the time, administrative, and financial burdens of cancer and its care.