Creating bespoke end-of-treatment summaries

Abstract

Introduction The NHS Long Term Plan states that by 2021, every person diagnosed with cancer should have access to personalised care including an end-of-treatment summary. This summary document aims to provide both patients and their general practitioners with accessible information regarding all treatment received and potential side effects, signs/symptoms of disease recurrence and contact details for addressing concerns. Producing an individualised document meeting all the patient’s needs (considering the many different breast cancer pathways) is, however, both challenging and time consuming. Methods Work was conducted with the hospital information technology (IT) department to produce a breast cancer database and proforma that were built in to existing hospital IT systems. Patient information is entered on this database by the clinical team via the electronic proforma. Results Using this breast cancer database for the last 2.5 years has allowed the creation of personalised and detailed end-of-treatment summaries for patients and general practitioners (currently 765), and will facilitate accurate data collection for service quality improvement. In addition, 24 individual issues in the patient pathway have been identified and opportune identification of these issues allows for timely correction to minimise harm to patients. Conclusions The described approach utilises existing hospital IT systems to build a prospective, accessible, customised breast cancer patient database to generate quick but detailed and accessible end-of-treatment summaries. The implemented system has been found to be efficient and accurate while also rapidly identifying errors and areas for improvement in the patient pathway.