Delivering and demonstrating clinical quality excellence in oncology

The three steps below will help you evaluate the quality of your cancer program on an ongoing basis.

Step 1: Understand what high-value cancer care means.

Read the Strategic Road Map for Cancer Quality to learn five steps oncology service line leaders should take to create a value-based quality strategy. Then, use our Build the High-Value Cancer Care Team report to learn six tactics to make the most of your cancer care team, extend capacity through technology, and manage patients across the continuum.

Step 2: Identify opportunities for improvement.

These three practices will help you build a platform for strategic quality improvement:

• Analysis-guided program design: A system-wide effort to reduce care variation by bringing together physician, staff, and patient input to isolate the most important, actionable metrics and translate those into action.
• Templatized patient pathways: Care maps that give providers a global understanding of the care process, reveal problematic transition points or processes, and set the stage for targeted performance improvement.
• Customized patient tracking: Commercial and homegrown solutions to help manage patient information across the course of treatment, ensuring that patients have access to timely, high-quality care.

Step 3: Create a performance tracking initiative.

Finally, you’ll need the infrastructure to routinely measure your quality performance. This is inherently challenging with data integrity and system integration hurdles. Start by reading our best practice for creating a tumor site-specific quality database.

Then, use the Cancer Quality Dashboard Metric Selection Tool to develop a customized, tumor site-specific dashboard. Our tool includes benchmarks supported by clinical literature and endorsed by national quality organizations. And review the quality metric picklist, which highlights metrics your peers are tracking at their organizations. You can use the Metric Prioritization Worksheet to rank the quality metrics you have identified and create a “pick list” of the most appropriate quality metrics for your cancer program. Explore the Oncology Dashboard Toolkit for more information on selecting the right metrics, improving dashboard data collection, and deriving value from your dashboard.

As we transition from fee-for-service to value-based reimbursement, cancer providers will need to deliver on the longstanding goals of delivering high-quality care at a reduced cost.

• Explore lessons for transitioning from fee-for-service to value-driven reimbursement in New Rules for Oncology Service Line Growth.
• Learn how to build a high-value cancer care team.
• Read about different value-based payment pilots in oncology.
• View our Oncology value-based payment resource library for updates on oncology value-based payment models and tools to track your performance.
• Choose metrics for measuring your service line’s performance in a value-based market.

Based on our research and data analysis, most cancer programs have three significant and immediate opportunities to improve care. Check out our Launch cancer care transformation infographic to start, and then tap into the resources below.

Opportunity 1: Reduce unwarranted care variation and ensure adherence to care standards.

• Reduce Unwarranted Care Variation in Oncology will help you reduce non-value-added care and use clinical pathways effectively.
• Read about the latest trends on clinical pathways in oncology.

Opportunity 2: Identify and manage urgent symptom needs.

• How to Keep Your Cancer Patients Out of the ED highlights how programs identify drivers of avoidable ED and hospital utilization and dedicate resources to manage urgent symptoms in the cancer center.
• Use our Chemotherapy patient avoidable utilization assessment to understand how your chemotherapy patients’ avoidable ED and inpatient utilization compares to your peers, and identify your top opportunities to reduce avoidable utilization by exploring characteristics of these events and the patients experiencing them.
• Use our Cancer Patient Urgent Care Pro Forma to evaluate the best model for providing cancer patients with urgent symptom support based on your program's priorities.
• Urgent Care for Cancer Patients offers four key tactics for meeting the needs of cancer patients with urgent symptoms.
• Learn about the applications of remote patient monitoring in oncology by exploring the patient monitoring resources in the Oncology telehealth resource library.

Opportunity 3: Improve care delivered at the end of life.

• Improving End-of-Life Care for Cancer Patients highlights four tactics for reducing costs and improving quality.
• Ensuring that palliative care is integrated early in cancer patients' care is critical for improving end-of-life care. Check out Integrating Palliative Care into Oncology Practice to learn six hallmarks of best-in-class programs, and view our other resources to help you deliver effective palliative care to cancer patients.
• Use our Cancer Support Service Volumes, Staffing, and Operations Benchmark Generator to compare your palliative care staffing levels and volumes to your peers.
• Check out our List of Available End-of-Life Care Training Programs to find training programs that teach how to have meaningful end-of-life discussions with patients.
• Review common types of advance care planning documents and the questions URMC uses to coach patients to initiate conversations about end-of-life care with their oncologists.

Once you have improved cancer program’s ability to deliver high-quality care, it is important to communicate about that quality with stakeholders in your market, especially cancer patients.

Opportunity 1: Achieve cancer program accreditation.

• View our webinar on picking the right cancer accreditation programs.
• Read about the updated CoC accreditation standards for 2020, then use the Commission on Cancer accreditation resource library to access best practices for achieving CoC accreditation requirements.
• Checking in on the cancer program accreditation landscape includes results and insights from our Trending Now in Cancer Care Survey, where over 290 cancer programs told us which accreditations and quality reporting programs they currently and plan to participate in.
• Learn how to make your accreditation meaningful for ‘shopping’ cancer patients.

Opportunity 2: Learn what matters to cancer patients.

• Use the Cancer Patient Experience Survey Results Portal to explore results from our 2019 and 2015 Cancer Patient Experience Surveys, in which patients shared their priorities and preferences for care.
• Read our expert insight from the 2019 Cancer Patient Experience Survey to learn about how patients consider clinical quality when choosing where to go for care.
• Online Cancer Program Marketing includes information about how patients search for quality data and tactics for marketing cancer program quality to self-guided cancer patients.

Opportunity 3: Provide specialized clinical services to differentiate your cancer program.

• Learn about the latest technologies for surgical, interventional, medical, and radiation oncology and cancer screening and diagnosis in the Oncology Clinical Technology Compendium.
• Find our take on the latest innovations and practices for maximizing return on investment in Clinical Innovations in Oncology.
• View the best resources to guide your precision medicine strategy, including resources on developing your precision medicine strategy, effectively implementing your precision medicine program, and learning about innovations in precision medicine.
• Use the Tumor Site Strategy Toolkit to address every major decision point in building out tumor site programs in order to provide patients with specialized care.

For more best practices in delivering high-quality cancer care, view our Six Priorities to Drive High Quality Cancer Care webinar.