Carevive’s CEO and Co-Founder, Madelyn Herzfeld, R.N., B.S.N., O.C.N., is featured in video interviews from the Cancer Center Business Summit that are now live on OBR’s video library.
In these short videos, she talks about challenges practices are facing when implementing patient engagement, patient-reported data, and solutions to drive better patient engagement.
What are the challenges practices are facing when implementing patient engagement?
Well we’re finding that it’s not just figuring out the patient engagement challenge caring today are completely overwhelmed with trying to figure out patient engagement and clinical trials and genomic profiling. It’s very overwhelming for these care teams to try and figure everything out all at once. What we’re finding with our implementations this is that it’s not just about turning over patient engagement software and hoping that the care teams can figure out what will be their processes. We need to come in and be very consultative about workflow, about clinical competencies and who’s catching what, when, and where. And somewhere in there there’s the patient engaged and software as well.
How do oncology practices consume patient-reported data to improve patient care?
That’s a tough one. We’ve been at this for almost four years now at Carevive and we’ve learned some fundamental principles that you can’t go into a practice and I’m hand over some technology and expect that there will be successful outcomes because technology is only one piece. There is a very consultative piece around workflow and around clinical competencies that go along with the technologies. Little details are really critical. So, for us incorporating patient-reported data at the point-of-care, it’s really about making sure that you’re doing it well in advance of treatment visit and that information is clear and accessible to the provider at the point of care. And then ultimately, all these data that you’re collecting on your patients about their symptoms and our quality of life on treatment is captured in a way that you can analyze it to continuously improve patient care.
What potential solutions available for practices to implement better patient engagement?
We believe that the heart of patient engagement is collecting patient-reported data. And you do that across the cancer continuum starting at a diagnosis and at the treatment planning phase. What we are incorporating is making sure we understand and embed patient goals of care into the decision-making process and also risk stratifying patients and making sure that patients are fit for the treatment that is intended for them. Once a patient is on treatment then we also want to know what are the symptoms that we should be looking for to keep patients on treatment and keep them out of the hospital. Collecting and understanding what their diagnosis and treatment is and what are going to be the possible issues that patient has and making sure that were proactive about addressing that.