Increasing patient engagement

Personalizing healthcare

Patient-centered care means more than making therapy decisions based on specific disease information and comorbidities. It also reflects the desires of the patient.

Increasing patient engagement

Personalizing healthcare

Patient-centered care means more than making therapy decisions based on specific disease information and comorbidities. It also reflects the desires of the patient..

The clinician’s mission — to provide the best possible care for each patient — predates modern medicine by millennia

Many demands faced by physicians today can reduce time for patient visits and opportunities to engage with patients and their families in care plans due to:

  • An ever-growing body of patient-specific data
  • Increasing medical and scientific research
  • Record-keeping responsibilities for electronic medical records (EMRs) and specialty health systems
  • Larger caseloads

Benefits for patients and their care teams

Patient-centricity primarily seeks improvement for each individual through the sensitive application of treatment according to patient tumor information, biomarkers, genomic data and more. As patients receive better care, clinicians and their institutions see:1

  • Improved satisfaction scores
  • Enhanced reputations
  • Potentially greater resource allocation
  • Reduced expenses and increased financial margins

Achieving the best possible care

When both patients and their physicians cooperate in treatment planning, shared decision-making supports patient trust in cancer care teams and their institutions.

Cancer patients interviewed post-diagnosis about treatment decision-making had distinct opinions about adherence to clinical pathways and collaboration between themselves and their care teams.

These participants valued the effects of shared decision-making, including:2

  • Education from their clinicians about multiple treatment options (57%)
  • Research, guided by their oncologists, into those options (57%)
  • Goal-sharing with oncologists to jointly develop practical treatment plans (52%)

67

of patients believed that the best possible care resulted when both patients and their physicians had at least some choice in treatment planning.2

Advocating for the patient in the multidisciplinary team

Multidisciplinary teams that include an oncology nurse navigator can base their decisions on more than tumor information and patient medical history. The nurse navigator shares patient and family preferences, values, cultural traditions and socioeconomic conditions with the treatment team to help ensure treatment decisions consider the patient’s social, emotional and financial situations.

Nurse navigators perform several important functions.

A woman in a white coat collaborating virtually via her laptop

Liaising with the patient

Nurse navigators get to know the patient’s personal preferences, help resolve patient obstacles within the healthcare system and educate the patient about treatment options. They may coordinate other services or referrals to peer support programs, social workers, financial counselors, mental and emotional health providers, and transportation assistance.

Virtual collaboration with a physician

Coordinating tumor board conferences

In navify Tumor Board, nurse navigators manage and schedule logistics and patient case reviews. They may assist in presentation creation, clinical trial identification through navify Clinical Trial Match app* and treatment decision documentation.

Improving communication with patients

navify Guidelines app enables the easy capture of patient treatment paths in concordance with or as rationalized alternatives to clinical practice guidelines.

Decisions, documented in a step progression side-by-side with clinical practice guidelines or in a decision tree format, may be exported to the EMR or downloaded for the patient.

  1. ‘What is Patient-Centered Care?’, NEJM Catalyst, 1 January 2017.
  2. Franklin E. F., et al. (2018) ‘Cancer Patient Perspectives on the Use of Clinical Pathways and Shared Decision-Making in Cancer Care’, Journal of Clinical Pathways, 4(9), p46-50.

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