Page 16 - Christiana Care Focus

During his cancer treatment, Joseph Bates felt supported on all sides by his SCOOP team, including Nurse Navigator Ginny Pugh, BSN, RN, OCN, and Social Worker Ronna Glenn, MSW.
New clinical pathway for cancer patients
leads to better outcomes and lower health care costs
A new clinical pathway for patients with cancer is improving quality of life, providing better health outcomes and delivering lower heath care costs, according to a study published in the May 2019 issue of the Journal of Clinical Pathways.
Aclinical pathway is a tool
for achieving high-quality, high-value care through standardization, ensuring that all patients who meet a given criteria receive consistent evidence-based care without unnecessary variation.
Called Supportive Care of Oncology Patients or SCOOP, the pathway launched in November 2016 and initially focused on patients with potentially curable thoracic, colorectal or head and neck cancers who were receiving combined chemotherapy and radiation through one of the Graham Cancer Center’s multidisciplinary clinics.
Due to the nature of their treatment, these patients are at higher risk for debilitating side effects that can send them to the emergency department, such as dehydration from nausea and vomiting, pain or psychosocial distress.
For the first two years of the pathway, when compared to a control group of similar patients not on the pathway, SCOOP patients experienced fewer visits to the emergency department (34% vs. 54%), fewer hospital admissions (23%
vs. 34%) and fewer readmissions (18% vs. 32%). Correspondingly, cost savings for pathway patients was estimated
on average to be more than $1,500 per patient. The total cost savings for 207 SCOOP patients thru Oct. 31, 2018, was more than $319,000.
“The SCOOP protocol is a unique, early intervention tool shown to improve
how we treat curative cancer patients effectively, safely and at lower cost,” said Nicholas J. Petrelli, M.D., Bank of America endowed medical director of the Helen
F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute. “Our experience would indicate that any group of patients at high risk
for emergency department visits and hospital admissions could potentially benefit from this kind of approach.”
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