[MINI-PODCAST] AMCCBS Live: Care Measurement

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Hear from the co-founder of the Imagination Lab for Clinical Innovation at LIVESTRONG Cancer Institutes on effective practices for measuring new models of care, including clinical outcomes, access to care, care coordination; and the value of engaging patients early and often throughout their care journey to support a better quality of life.

Guest:

Rebekkah Schear, MIA
Associate Director, Patient Experience; Co-Founder, Imagination Lab for Clinical Innovation
The University of Texas Dell Medical School, LIVESTRONG Cancer Institutes

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Transcript

CANCER BUZZ: Welcome back to CANCER BUZZ live in Washington, DC at the ACCC Annual Meeting and Cancer Center Business Summit (AMCCBS). I'm your host Summer Johnson here with us now is Rebekkah Schear, MIA. If you wouldn't mind introducing yourself and what you do to the audience would be great.

Rebekkah Schear, MIA: Sure. So my name's Rebekkah Schear and I'm the Associate Director of Patient Experience at the Livestrong Cancer Institutes where the Clinical Academic Cancer Center at the University of Texas at Austin. And in my role in patient experience, I do a handful of things, but design programs and services look at overall strategy for our cancer clinic, patient engagement and community engagement, quality improvement evaluation is a huge piece of what I do. And, and that's what I was here chatting about today.

CANCER BUZZ: And you were on a panel called How to Evaluate the Impact of Cancer Programs and Clinical Services. What was the biggest takeaway?

Rebekkah Schear, MIA: And that one, I think the message that we wanted to leave our audience with is that really three things evaluation should start early and should be done throughout the process of having a program or a clinical service implemented. So if you're lucky enough to get to design a program from scratch, then you want to bring the evaluation planning early, early into the process. And you also want to engage patients early and often in that process as well. And so if our patients are ultimately the recipients and beneficiaries of our care, hopefully they're being pulled into the design of the programs and services themselves.

But if not, we should absolutely bring them in and engage them when we're talking about how to evaluate quality of life, because there are measures that matter to patients that we might not even be thinking about when we're devising our evaluation strategy.

CANCER BUZZ: So one of the questions that your session was to answer is how can we assess if new models of care are working? What's the answer?

Rebekkah Schear, MIA: It's a complicated one. I think that there are ways to assess if new models of care are working by looking at a set of domains, that's valuable to what your model is supposed to do. So the first thing that I would say is important for anyone at any cancer center to do is to build what I would call a ‘logical framework’. And I shared this tool in our session, and it's really a single page snapshot of your program. What are the inputs, the outputs, and then the short, medium, and long-term outcomes that you want your program to achieve?

Do you want to improve quality of life? Are you looking at survival? Are you wanting to improve access to care? Are you wanting to improve care communication between your patients and your providers? Are you trying to look at improving provider resiliency with your program or is it all about looking at the patients themselves? Right. So there's a lot of different elements you could look at and you need to pick domains and metrics to measure that are specifically tied to the outcomes that you want to achieve, because there's a million ways that you could measure things.

I tend to think that when we're measuring new models of care in innovative models, we need to not just look at the traditional clinical metrics, right? So it's very well known that we need to look at survival rates. We need to look at readmission rates and hospitalization rates. We need to look at number of days from when a patient gets diagnosed until they start their treatment, things like that. But there's a lot more that we can look at and measure, and particularly around quality of life for patients and patient experience. Those are some of the newer areas that I would encourage any new models to measure.

CANCER BUZZ: Thank you, Rebekkah. All of this week's content is on the ACCC website at accc-cancer.org/AMCCBS. You can stay tuned to this audio channel for more content for the CANCER BUZZ team. This is Summer Johnson.

CANCER BUZZ: CANCER BUZZ is a resource of the Association of Community Cancer Centers.