Champion’s Prize Enabling City of Hope to Serve More Survivors
We are pleased to share this second 2023 Survivorship Champion’s Prize update from the City of Hope Long Term Follow-Up Clinic for Survivors of Childhood, Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) Cancer, on how the Prize is making a difference in their survivorship services.
Rusha Bhandari, MD, MS, Medical Director for City of Hope’s survivorship clinic, reports that the Prize has enabled them to continue refining their ‘Survivorship Application,’ an electronic database that will allow the clinic better integration and streamlining of processes. This means that City of Hope will be able to more effectively and efficiently serve more survivors.
“We have continued to work on the three pillars, making improvements in accessibility, repairability, and efficiency of the application,” Dr. Bhandari said, noting progress made since the last update.
Moving forward, team members should be able to easily adapt code components to meet their evolving needs and more easily address new concerns or issues. This improves the start-up time a new site will have as they link the application with the back-end infrastructure their site supports.
“We are now better able to filter data to identify subsets of our patient population during key milestones, allowing us to re-engage patients in their survivorship care,” she explains.
Beyond these new features, a considerable effort has been made to train staff members to ensure they are comfortable using the application and all of its features. Team members have now been trained on how to independently generate data reports and patient-related documents.
According to Dr. Bhandari, the clinic has already seen numerous benefits from the Champion's Prize award, specifically with streamlining workflows. She emphasized how critical this is, as it allows them to expand their reach and increase the number of childhood, adolescent, and young adult cancer survivors to whom they provide services. City of Hope is looking forward to continuing to share the Survivor Application with other sites, along with the ongoing efforts to perfect the codebase and documentation for both the front-end and back-end infrastructure.