Cancer is an overwhelming diagnosis to receive. It brings about significant anxiety and uncertainty into a patient's life, their relationships, and their future in this world. Many have trouble navigating cancer due to the highly complex, costly, and overall confusing healthcare system. The patient is unknowingly the project manager that manages multiple specialists, care team members, appointments, medication adherence, and updates to family and friends.
The majority of people are overwhelmed in being the project manager while also facing the common side effects that come from surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and other treatment protocols. Commonly, clinics offer patients a stack of brochures and papers on "just-in-case" symptom management techniques and offer links to information that are, most often, buried on their clinic or hospital website.
To combat this complex problem, cancer programs need to offer patient navigation services that combine digital tools with their current nurse and specialist interactions. Both clinics and hospitals have a desire to move away from multi-communication (phone, email, EMR mail) reactionary care, toward digital implementations that streamline communication and proactively highlight key patients and target areas of those patients' problems to focus on. This will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of those oncology clinics and hospital oncology programs, to deliver a higher level of patient-centered care with high patient engagement throughout their journey.
Here are the top tools for developing a patient-centered clinical oncology practice in 2025:
Utilize electronic patient-reported outcomes (e-PRO) data to build stronger patient-physician relationships
Patient-reported inputs offer an oncology practice significant insights about how patients are traversing through their care journey. Captured on either a smartphone or a web portal, the patient data can be easily obtained on a routine daily basis. Often an oversight for many solutions out there, many cancer patients experience peripheral neuropathy which makes this daily habit difficult due to the complex survey-style nature of many offerings.
Reduce call volume and dropped clinic calls to drive higher quality clinic operational efficiency
Utilizing ePRO in combination with voice-to-text daily journalling enables nurses to dive into patients with high alerts and have a better understanding of what’s happening at-home with the patient without even speaking to them yet. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence, nurses can get key insights into patient needs before they even proactively reach out to the patient to help them with navigating cancer. This frees up more nurse time and reduces the overall call time needed per patient.
Combining the selected symptoms in ePRO with hospital guidance, clinic guidance, and leading medical authority guidance such as ASCO, Cancer.net, and so on, can help patients and their loved ones do first level triage actions to help mitigate the symptoms they are experiencing. It is often overlooked that not every person has the same health literacy and that having clear guidance can go a long way toward empowering patients and caregivers. The key to a clinic benefiting from this practice is to serve it to the patients and caregivers when they need it, which often isn’t when they are with you at the clinic but rather at-home, in the moment, experiencing those symptoms.
CCM, PCM, EOM, and PIN to provide optimal support for patients
It’s important to recognize that there are different ways to capture payment for extending the clinic services to the home. CCM (Chronic Care Management), PCM (Principal Care Management), EOM (Enhanced Oncology Model), and PIN (Principal Illness Navigation) provide a comprehensive framework to support patients navigating complex healthcare journeys. CCM and PCM focus on remote care for chronic and principal conditions, ensuring continuity and coordination across multidisciplinary teams. EOM is a newer model specific to oncology, which emphasizes value-based care in oncology by targeting improved outcomes and reduced costs through innovative, patient-centered interventions. Though EOM can't be used by a clinic for the same patient in conjunction with CCM or PCM. Meanwhile PIN can be used with EOM and it reimburses the services that clinics often already provided at a cost to the bottom line to improve patient care such as guiding patients with serious illnesses by offering tailored navigation services, simplifying care coordination, and addressing emotional and logistical challenges.
The important thing with EOM is that you can provide data to the CMS Innovation Center in advance to assess how the clinic would succeed in a simulation model based on the two available risk arrangements to choose from. It’s important to look at the details of PIN, as it is often stated by many panels at conferences that the 60min in-person time block is not only tough to achieve clinically, but also tough from a patient perspective when they are facing a tough journey and now need yet another visit to conduct the PIN services.
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