GW caSNP and Carevive Health teamed for the webinar Survivorship Care Plans: Introducing A Novel Technology to Transform Burden into Opportunity on April 15. The 1 hour timeframe was not enough for presenter Dr. Carrie Stricker to answer all the participant questions, therefore we thought it prudent to post all of the answers here on our blog. We’d like to thank the staff at GWU caSNP and to all of the participants.
- Is it at the 30 day visit that the patients fills out the survey on the tablet? If not, when is this done? And when are you reviewing the care plan/treatment summary- at 30 day–and if you do this on a tablet or laptop to review plan?
I believe this question is asking about the recommended timing for delivery of survivorship care plans. While some centers are indeed doing this at a visit approximately 30 days following completion of active treatment, this is not standard or required timeline. Carevive patient surveys and/or survivorship care plans can be completed at or prior to any designated clinical visit. Our cloud-based platform enables care plans to be reviewed on any web-enabled device, including laptops, tablets, desktops, and other mobile devices. - For older patients who are not computer savvy how do you supply them the information that younger patients would click on URL to obtain the information?
First and foremost, we ensure that the most critical and directive information is provided directly on the care plan so the patients can access it without navigating to any hyperlinks. However, to ensure that all patients have access to the entirety of information in our care plans, our centers employ a variety of approaches. Some print these in bulk and place in an educational kiosk or center in the clinic, where the patient can pick up the printed copy during or after the survivorship visit. Others print directly for the patient, at the time of the encounter, based on which information the patient wishes to read. Yet again others direct patients to a PC in the clinic area where they can navigate to the URLs, with assistance if needed. Importantly, the age barrier is lessening. As noted by the Pew Research center, older adults hit a digital milestone last year: For the first time since the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project began conducting surveys, a majority (53 percent) of people over age 65 used the Internet. The proportion has since inched upward, to 54 percent. (Source: http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/04/03/older-adults-and-technology-use/) - Can it connect in with primary care systems?
Our platform generates a pdf that can be shared electronically with primary care and all other clinicians who share the management of cancer patients. The PDFs can be emailed or faxed; functionality depends on the policies and procedures of our customers. We are currently working on integrating our system with EPIC and Cerner, which will ultimately offer additional mechanisms to connect information from medical oncology to other providers. - What cancer registry software does this product interface with?
Our registry interface is designed to be registry independent, but rather has been built using the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries, Inc (NAACCR) data dictionary. Thus we can work with most cancer registry software programs since they all conform to this dictionary. If you have specific questions about your institution’s registry software, please contact us. - Is this care plan technology for use in individual health systems or is it possible to use at the state-level cancer registry?
See #4 above – all registries are based on the NAACCR data dictionary, so our approach with institution’s cancer registries should be translatable to state level cancer registries. We have had preliminary conversations with several state level cancer registries to further explore this. - We are Cerner EMR but have different registry software throughout our system.
We have current sites with whom we are working on similar scenarios. Please contact us at for more information and to discuss the unique needs of your center. - How are these care plans updated?
Our platform is updated quarterly by our clinical team in consultation with our network of over 250 clinician and scientific faculty. Content is derived from both professional society guidelines/guidance (ASCO, NCCN, ONS, WHO, NIH, to name a few) and other peer-reviewed sources of evidence (published integrative reviews, consensus statements, and articles) and integrates best-in-breed patient educational materials and resources from advocacy groups such Cancer Care, Living Beyond Breast Cancer, ASCO’s Cancer.net, and others. - Is there a lung tracking nodule ability?
We are eager to understand what functionality you specifically are seeking and would love to talk more with you about your needs. Please contact us. - Can this be used in place of a navigation software system?
Our Care planning system provides trackable recommendations and referrals for patients across the cancer care continuum. Our data management and reporting capabilities can be leveraged for patient navigation. Please contact us to discuss with us your unique needs. - How does this work for patients on maintenance therapy, or patients with metastatic disease?
Our care planning system is applicable to patients of all types, including those with active disease. We would love to show you more via a live individual demo. Please request one at http://bit.ly/gwonqwebinar - How does your product compare with Web Plus and other freeware programs?
Carevive’s Care Planning System extends beyond the capabilities that freeware programs can offer. We focus on providing personalized and proactive care plans at the point of care, tailored for each individual patient, and localized to a given institution’s resources and preferences for content. Freeware programs typically provide require manual entry to personalize content to the individual patient, and typically cannot support local configuration of care plan recommendations and resources. We also leverage our extensive network of over 250 clinical and scientific faculty to keep the content of our care plans up-to-date and evidence-based; thus, it is again the scientific rigor and clinical relevance of our content that distinguishes us. Finally, our care plans incorporate patient reported data and outcomes for even more sophisticated tailoring to the individual patient needs and concerns. - How does the Carevive system compare to others such as Equicare?
We do not believe Carevive Health has direct competition as a comprehensive care planning and patient management solution for use across the cancer care continuum. Carevive offers the ability to capture electronic patient reported outcomes (ePRO) for distress and symptom experiences, provides symptom and survivorship clinical decision support, generates patient-facing and highly tailored symptom and survivorship care plans, provides backend analytics for health systems, and drives and captures data on clinical trial accrual. We also assist centers in meeting and documenting adherence to numerous oncology quality standards (CoC, QOPI, NAPBC, OMH, among others)As a company, our scientific rigor distinguishes us in the industry. We’ve had 250 clinician experts to date contribute for just women’s cancers and we expect over 1,000 expert contributors as we move across the major tumor types. The sophistication of our rules engine allows us to offer significant personalization of care plan content. Our technology architecture allows us to configure/localize our platform for a health system customer within 48 hours. The data we collect and aggregate allows our customers to derive actionable insights to deliver better quality care, more effective care coordination, and more engaged patients. - Does this tool include spiritual care recommendations based on patient interviews? These are integral to palliative care treatment, which should be part of any SCP. Thanks.
Yes, Betty Ferrell, PhD, RN, FAAN authored a section in our content library. - How long does this take to generate for a specific institution?
It varies on the level of integration with your cancer registry/EMR and how quickly you and your team can pull your localized content together. Your center can be up and running in 2-4 weeks with minimal integration. - Is the clinical trial link already sorted by the patient’s EMR & Cancer registry inclusion/exclusion criteria? Meaning, they do qualify and therefore won’t be wasting their time going to the clinical trial link. This would be excellent integration if done.
Yes, the platform is already being used to assess patient eligibility for clinical trials. Learn more here. - Have the colors appearing on screen as blue, orange, green and red been evaluated for patients who are colorblind? For on-screen reading, do patients who have a seeing disability have a way to increase point size? A 14 point font is often recommended.
The user interface (UI) of our platform is coded with responsive web design and the layout and fonts automatically adapt to the user’s screen. For zoom in and out, it can be via the browser or pinch zooms on mobile devices. Color scheme for the colorblind is good feedback to take into consideration for future releases. In fact, one of the benefits of our network is the opportunity to share experiences/expertise with our other users, as we are sure other Carevive users would be interested in better understanding and incorporating your suggestions into their configuration. - How is the primary care MD integrated at the beginning of the follow-up?
This depends on our cancer center customer’s (and their patients’) preferences. The system generates a PDF of the care plan. The center and/or patient can choose who and how others can receive the PDF. - What are the criteria to become a test site?
To be a Beta user for Epic or Cerner integration your cancer center needs to have been on their EMR for at least one year, and have clinical and IT support of the beta project. - Can this be used for a navigation software system? Can you track lung nodules?
Repeat question – see #8 and #9 above - How are Carevive Health and/or the GW Cancer Institute supporting, engaging, improving care coordination, and clinician relationships with transgender cancer patients? The Q system does not give you the choice to mark transgender as a gender option. So, how do you take these patients thru the Carevive system?
In the Carevive Care Planning System, we have the options “male”, “female”, or “other”. We welcome additional input on how to address this issue in a sensitive manner. - Have these survivorship plans have been designed for other cancer than breast cancer?
Yes, we are currently offering survivorship care plans for gynecological cancers in addition to breast cancer, have completed our content build for lymphoma, are actively working on colorectal, prostate, and lung cancer, and will have survivorship care plans available for 70% of all tumor types by the end of 2015.