PURPOSE: To establish a program utilizing a multidisciplinary team to address health care disparities and improve outcomes. To develop a process that would streamline our navigation workflow and assist with the identification of barriers to care. Thus, enabling the Cancer Care program to focus on what really matters— - Veterans.
PROBLEM: The Cancer Care program utilized a series of spreadsheets and an Access database to follow the care of Veterans receiving care within Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System (SLVHCS) and for those Veterans being care for in the community. Each navigator has distinct intervals in which they contact or educate their patients for which care must be carefully coordinated. Our team strives to provide a multidisciplinary approach, but our former workflow of 12 years not only restricted us to one user at a time, but it also restricted usage to one service at a time. Our Clinical Nurse Navigators, Cancer Care Social Worker and Registered Nutritionist were creating and utilizing customized spreadsheets via an Excel program which also restricted access within services. These technological constraints further increased potential for negative outcomes and delays in care.
METHOD: Standardize our navigation process and allow for systemic changes within the department. With over 200 patient navigation programs to choose from (Institute for Alternative Futures, 2007); we adopted OncoNav as our navigation software program. OncoNav is oncologyspecific software designed to help Patient Navigators schedule, track, organize, and report their interactions with patients. It is designed to integrate into the Navigator’s workflow, allowing Navigators to quickly view pertinent patient information, add notes, schedule appointments and run patient-specific reports seamlessly from one system. After purchasing and implementing, ONCONAV, staff participated in training and tailored the package to meet the needs unique to our cancer team.
OUTCOME: Enables staff to schedule, track, organize and report interventions. It optimizes a multidisciplinary approach in which the team can provide their respective expert recommendations and interventions in a singular location; easily accessible by all navigation team members.
IMPLICATIONS: Our goal is to promote and help establish our navigation process as best practice that will be utilized across VA networks.