Project Innovation seeks to involve patients, caregivers, advocates and health care providers, researchers and innovators to transform cancer care and treatment.
Project Innovation is committed to improving access to equitable, high quality health care through innovative approaches to delivering patient-centered care. The focus for these efforts is on five essential areas:
Shared decision-making
Care planning
Patient-reported outcomes
Care coordination and navigation
Decision support tools
Shared Decision-Making
Shared decision-making (SDM) is both a critical part of patient centered care and a product of the process that leads to patients and providers having the tools, information, resources and relationships to make truly shared treatment decisions.
○ What are the key steps/checkpoints needed to integrate SDM into the clinical workflow?
○ What tools are available or need to be developed for patients and providers to facilitate SDM?
○ How do address issues related to time and cost in terms of implementing SDM?
○ What impact has the increased use of telehealth had on communication and SDM?
○ How can patient preferences and goals be integrated into the development and implementation of clinical pathways?
"It’s the ability to customize your treatment experience and do so in a perspective that is informed….I’d like to take control of the experience so that I can have a quality of life that’s sustainable over a long time." - Amelia
Care Planning
Patients need timely, useful information, good communications and relationships with their providers and care decisions based on what matters most to them and what treatment option meets best meets clinical and personal goals. A true goal concordant plan needs to be revisited and refreshed at every critical juncture in the disease journey.
What does an actual goal concordant plan look like?
What tools/resources are necessary to reach this point?
How do you make this plan accessible to both patients and providers throughout the course of treatment?
How do you best document this plan?
How do you evaluate the plan in terms of its impact on high value care?
Patient-reported outcomes
Getting meaningful patient input into both the process and outcomes of treatment is essential to developing and implementing a patient centered health care system. This needs to go beyond standard “satisfaction” surveys, tapping into patient perceptions about the value of care, preferences and goals. There are multiple opportunities to involve patients in care planning, clinical trial design and implementation, clinical pathway design and implementation and clinical workflow processes.
Questions to Ask
At what points can patients be effectively involved to help design and implement patient centered health care?
How do we balance customization with standardization in generating and assessing patient reported outcomes?
How do we provide effective feedback to both patients and providers?
How do we move beyond standard patient satisfaction surveys to measure impact on outcomes?
I’m trying to have a good life while surviving for as long as possible...
In today’s medical world, there is a compelling need for active care coordination and navigation for medical, social and financial needs. This area requires additional work on how to ensure it happens throughout treatment and that improves both the quality of care and of the patient experience.
How can we best identify areas in which navigation will be most effective?
How do ensure that navigation extends to areas that are not directly related to clinical care, such as social and financial issues?
Can we pay for/reimburse time and effort for navigation?
How do we evaluate the impact of coordination and navigation on patient related outcomes?
Decision support tools
Decision Support Tools are a key component in advancing all aspects of patient centered care. There are numerous issues related to what kinds of tools work best, when and how to introduce, how to interconnect patient and provider facing tools and how to evaluate their effectiveness.
