Dr Adam Brufsky Outlines Care Coordination in Oncology

Care coordination is vital to ensure improved patient outcomes as both CMS and private payers are paying increased attention to it, pointed out Adam Brufsky, MD, PhD, co-director of the Comprehensive Breast Cancer Center at University of Pittsburgh. How is your institution infusing care coordination in its workflow?

Transcript

Care coordination is somewhat of a buzz word and everyone defines it differently. In our institution, what we do is we have navigators that help the patients go between surgeons, medical oncologists, radiation therapists, physical therapists if they need them. In the early-stage disease, I think care coordination in the metastatic setting involves again I think radiation therapists and medical oncologists, and to some lesser extent, surgeons.

We have a common electronic medical record (EMR), we have patient navigators; I think the neat thing about EMR in general I think it’s really care everywhere. Meaning if a patient gets care at another institution that shares the same kind of medical record, in our case, Epic, we actually can go into that patient’s data on another institution which really helps enormously for care coordination. In the past, you would have to fax records to figure out what was going on. I think EMR is really helping a lot with care coordination.