Ruben Vromans MA

Bio

Treatment decision-making in cancer care requires that both patient and clinician are well-informed about the clinical case and personal situation at hand. To support this process, patients can make use of decision aids, but, unfortunately, such tools tend to be generic and lack personalized explanations about treatment options and associated statistics (e.g., life expectancy, or risks of side effects). Moreover, such cancer statistics are difficult to understand for patients and are not always communicated in a patient-friendly way. 

In this project, we are trying to tackle these issues by (1) analyzing the data of millions of Dutch cancer patients (from the Netherlands Cancer Registry and PROFILES registry) in order to estimate personalized information about treatment options, and (2) investigating how to communicate such personalized treatment information to cancer patients, with the aim of facilitating shared decision-making between patient and clinician. 

Expertise

• Risk communication
• Personalization
• Decision aids
• Shared decision-making
• Cancer

Courses

• Statistics for Bachelor CIS
• Research Skills: Online Data Collection

Collaboration

• The Netherlands Comprehensive Cancer Organisation (IKNL)
• Kanker.nl

Recent publications

1. Eye blink rate predicts and dissociates the effective execution of ea…

   de Rooij, A., Vromans, R., & Dekker, M. (2019). Eye blink rate predicts and dissociates the effective execution of early and late stage creative idea generation. In A. Goel, C. Seifert, & C. Freska (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 41, pp. 1606-1612). Austin, TX.

2. Data-driven shared decision making on cancer treatment

   Hommes, S., Clouth, F., Vromans, R., Geleijnse, G., Pauws, S., Vermunt, J., ... Krahmer, E. (2019). Data-driven shared decision making on cancer treatment. Poster session presented at Big Data, Amersfoort, Netherlands.

3. Changes in internet use and wishes of cancer survivors - A comparison…

   van Eenbergen, M., Vromans, R., Boll, D., Kil, P. J. M., Vos, M. C., Krahmer, E., ... Van De Poll-franse, L. (2019). Changes in internet use and wishes of cancer survivors: A comparison between 2005 and 2017. Cancer, 1-8.

4. Assessing communicative aspects of patient decision aids for localize…

   Vromans, R., van Eenbergen, M., Pauws, S., Geleijnse, G., van der Poel, H., van de Poll-Franse, L. V., & Krahmer, E. (2019). Assessing communicative aspects of patient decision aids for localized prostate cancer treatment: A systematic review. Abstract from ICT.OPEN 2019, Hilversum, Netherlands.

5. Assessing the quality and communicative aspects of patient decision a…

   Vromans, R., Tenfelde, K., Pauws, S., van Eenbergen, M., Mares-Engelberts, I., Velikova, G., ... Krahmer, E. (2019). Assessing the quality and communicative aspects of patient decision aids for early-stage breast cancer treatment: a systematic review. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, 178(1), 1-15.