Overview of the care pathway
The lung cancer pathway is a multidisciplinary, transmural cancer care pathway that automatically collects the ICHOM lung cancer clinical indicators, helps the care team to coordinate care delivery, closely follows up on patients and ensures GPs are informed throughout the care process.
The pathway was created in an effort to improve quality of life for the patient, turn patients into active participants, increase involvement from the GP from diagnosis, detect adverse events and treatment side effects early, improve treatment decisions in a multidisciplinary team, optimize supportive care and introduce dedicated support around the end of life in a timely manner.
Patients are considered active participants and receive weekly action items such as going to the GP for a blood lab. GPs in turn are informed about the progress of the patients in the pathway thanks to automated progress notes sent to the GPs electronic medical record system.
The care team exists of nurse coordinators, psychologists, social workers, palliative nurses, oncologists and other supporting caregivers. Each profile is alerted specifically when a patient reports moderate or severe side effects. Care delivery in the pathway is standardized across all available treatment modalities, and 100% of the patients diagnosed with lung cancer can be included in the pathway, also those not on an active treatment.
We can divide the lung cancer care pathway into 3 phases:
- Baseline / choice of treatment
- Acute treatment phase
- Long-term follow-up post-treatment (annual survey for 10 years)
The backbone of the care pathway is summarized in the figure below, for this flow we relied mainly on the ICHOM standard set of Patient-Centered Outcome Measures for lung cancer.
Integrations
From your EMR to scheduling or billing, Awell easily connects with your systems so you can create powerful care pathways that tie disjointed systems together.
Dashboards
The following patient-reported-outcomes are visualized in the care pathway:
- EORTC-C30: Symptoms
- EORTC-C30: Functional
- QLQ-C3: Global Health Status
- Weekly PRO-CTCAE heatmap
Information brochures & video's
In the care pathway a number of information brochures and video's are included:
- Nutrition advice for cancer patients
- Side effects of radiotherapy
- Radiotherapy: general information brochure
Benefits
Professor Ingel Demedts have a masterclass about how the lung cancer pathway improves outcomes and reduces costs. You can watch this webinar via this link or you can read the scientific research here.
The care pathway has the following benefits:
- Reduced Emergency Department Visits (3,5% vs 4,8%)
- Overall higher survival rate (447 days vs 286 days)
- Shorter length of stay at the day clinic (2.5 hours vs 4.1 hours)
Besides the fact that the pathway improves outcomes and reduces costs, it also has other benefits:
- Automatic data collection based on the ICHOM Standard Set
- Automatic scoring calculations
- Integrated with your systems (Electronic Medical Record, scheduling, medical billing, online pharmacy & fulfilment, e-prescribing, insurance eligibility....)
- Decreased administrative burden for the care team
- Automatic alerts to the care team if patients reports alarming Patient-reported-outcomes
- Dynamic tips on how to self-manage side effects sent to patients
