Champions's Prize Update from City of Hope
Pictured: City of Hope’s Childhood, Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) Cancer Survivorship Program team
We’re pleased to share this impact update from our 2023 Survivorship Champion’s Prize recipient: City of Hope’s Long Term Follow-Up Clinic for Survivors of Childhood, Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) Cancer. The $10,000 Champion’s Prize is awarded annually to a group, program, or institution making significant advances in programs and services to provide lifelong health maintenance for survivors of childhood cancers. Read on to learn about how funds from the Champion’s Prize are making a difference in this program’s survivorship services since the award was made in October.
City of Hope has developed a ‘Survivorship Application,’ which is an electronic database that will allow the Clinic better integration and streamlining of processes. This includes screening patients for clinic eligibility, obtaining medical records, developing personalized treatment summaries, clinic scheduling, and management of patient communication. The Champion’s Prize has afforded City of Hope the opportunity to further refine this tool. The goal is to extend its utilization beyond internal purposes to make it a complete product that lends itself to adoption across diverse sites. City of Hope reports that substantial progress has been made in enhancing the technological infrastructure of the application while refining the user experience.
Rusha Bhandari, MD, MS, Medical Director, shared with us some of the key programs and services that have been enhanced through Prize funding over the past several months:
Refining the Survivorship Application infrastructure by improving the codebase of the application, expanding it with new features and improving existing ones. Attention has also been dedicated to identifying possible shortcomings and improving the application’s overall efficiency and speed.
Enhancing user experience of the Application based on feedback from program staff. The ongoing initiative aims to continue improvements in intuitiveness, making it accessible to all users regardless of expertise and experience.
Adding features and processes, including patient letter or document generation. This serves the dual purpose of expanding the scope of available data and letters for our staff while also streamlining the process for increased efficiency. The City of Hope Program has also begun exploring advanced automation features that can better inform staff of daily changes and updates through in-app and external notifications. The goal is to empower staff, enabling them to exert a more positive impact on the care provided to their patients.
Dr. Bhandari reports that each of the activities described above will continue to be under constant development and revision going forward. While the Application is now functional, they aim to further optimize the platform, anticipate future needs, and improve scalability. As features are improved, new features are added, and enhancements to the user experience are implemented, they’ll work to create comprehensive documentation for users, administrators, and developers. This will guarantee that other sites have the smoothest adaptation period while giving them the necessary tools to support the maintenance needs for decades to come.
As the Survivorship Application becomes more feature-rich and documentation is updated to reflect changes, enhancements, and new features, the hope is to both increase the adoption of the application as well as collaboration with others.
