Champion's Prize Enabled City of Hope to Optimize Survivor Services
Accessing and improving electronic health records is a critical issue for childhood cancer survivors and the institutions that serve them. Our Survivorship Champion’s Prize was awarded to City of Hope’s survivorship program one year ago and is helping to advance their program in this area.
Rusha Bhandari, MD, MS, Medical Director of the City of Hope Childhood, Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) Cancer Survivorship Program, shares with us how the award has made a difference in their survivorship services - and the lasting impact it will leave moving forward.
The Survivorship Champion’s Prize is a component of the Stewart Initiative for Childhood Cancer Survivors, an educational program of the Children’s Cancer Cause. Since its inception in 2020, the Survivorship Champion’s Prize has awarded $85,000 to a total of thirteen prestigious survivorship programs across the country.
The 2023 Champion’s Prize enabled City of Hope to dedicate efforts specifically towards optimizing their Survivorship Application, an electronic database that allows better integration and streamlining of processes, including screening patients for clinic eligibility, obtaining medical records, developing personalized treatment summaries, clinic scheduling, and management of patient communication, as well as integrating information with City of Hope’s medical records.
“This has been critical for a number of reasons,” says Dr. Bhandari. “It allows us to maintain an application that is updated in real-time, ensuring we have patients’ most current information. This facilitates effective communication with patients and coordination of their survivorship visits in a manner that minimizes patient burden.”
The Application is vital to the Program’s growing multidisciplinary team.
Dr. Bhandari highlighted other critical programs or services that have been enhanced in the Survivorship Application through support from the Champion’s Prize:
The ability for multiple team members to track their individual and shared tasks in real-time all in one application, allowing for more streamlined workflow to complete the necessary steps that must occur prior to the initial clinic visit such as identifying an interested patient, obtaining medical records, developing a treatment summary, and scheduling.
Allowing team members to independently generate patient-related documents to send to patients or their providers. These enhancements ultimately help the Program decrease the time it takes to get patients scheduled in the clinic, and to working with patients to communicate with other members of their care team.
Dr. Bhandari stressed that the Champion’s Prize provided the resources to allocate dedicated time and effort towards optimizing the Survivorship Application, which will have a lasting impact:
“This will be the primary source for all of our Survivorship Clinic operations, including patient identification, scheduling, tracking of treatment summary completion, and ensuring regular follow-up. Looking ahead, we plan to share this Microsoft-based application with other interested programs.”