Using electronic medical records system to advance cancer survivorship programs.

Abstract

65 Background: Survivorship care is now being increasingly recognized as an important part of cancer care. The Commission on Cancer (CoC) Standard 3.3 now recommends 100% compliance in the delivery of Survivorship Care Plans (SCP) by 2019 to eligible survivors. However, there are no systematic ways of ensuring compliance of Care Plan delivery and assessing patient eligibility. There are also no standardized methods for documentation or data collection to ensure appropriate consolidation of information from the electronic medical record (EMR) to a SCP, to assess for patient eligibility for survivorship follow up, or to appropriately report on timely delivery and follow-up with Survivorship Programs. Methods: Our survivorship team worked closely with the Cancer Registry Program, nurse navigators, and Information Technology team to optimize our institution owned EPIC electronic medical records system to populate and consolidate information automatically into patient specific care plans. By having electronic care plans, we are able to deliver plans to all members of the care team and to the patients. We also created discrete methods of flagging eligible survivors and automated data reporting and collection to ensure compliance and timeliness of care plan delivery. Results: By optimizing our electronic medical records system and our workflow process for Care Plan delivery, we were able to increase our delivery compliance rate to 100%. We are able to track patients through their care delivery and appropriately refer to our survivorship program and track care plan delivery. Conclusions: The CoC has implemented new standards to encourage appropriate survivorship care delivery and proper communication for ongoing survivorship care and follow up. With these new standards comes the challenge of developing and implementing a system for creating, delivering and evaluating the delivery of SCP. For our team to provide quality survivorship care that is measurable, we have developed data analysis and reports through our EMR with assistance from our IT department. These improvements utilizing our IT and EMR more efficiently has provided us with the ability to achieve 100% care plan delivery compliance.