Candice Roth, MSN, RN, CENP, Reviews Creation of Electronic Treatment Pathways at Levine Cancer Institute

At the Association of Community Cancer Centers 48th Annual Meeting & Cancer Center Business Summit, CancerNetwork® spoke with Candice Roth, MSN, RN, CENP, assistant vice president at Levine Cancer Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina, to discuss the creation of electronic treatment pathways across all of Levine Cancer Institutes. Treatment pathways offer clinicians recommendations regarding treatment directly in the electronic health records. The aim is to give each patient access to a consistent, standardized experience across the health system.

Transcript:

We have built as a team, through our providers and multi-disciplinary section meetings, what we believe to be best practice in terms of treatment options based on diseases, staging, etc. We wanted to create a standardized approach that could be consistent across all our sites. We are a very large cancer institute that hits both North and South Carolina, and now into the Georgia area; we have [about] 25 sites.

To ensure that we are providing the same quality of care across all those sites, this pathway platform was created using NCCN [National Comprehensive Cancer Network] guidelines, but then also using the expertise of our sub-specialists within each disease site to create those pathways. As we’ve moved through, we have been able to add a clinical trial [search capability]. Anytime there’s a clinical trial that is open and available, it’s a visual reminder for those providers to encourage [participation], or to at least have that conversation to see if patients are eligible. If there is smoking cessation [recommended], that’s included; if there’s palliative care consult, that’s included. All of that is there through icons, just as a visual reminder for providers [so they don’t] miss a step as part of that process.