Aims:
Despite significant improvements in cancer care, data collection reflects only limited dimensions of care provision whilst the effects on the wellbeing of patients are largely unreported. Value-based healthcare (VBHC) seeks to improve health outcomes while minimising the overall cost of healthcare through expansion of the current data collections to include items that are more relevant to patient outcomes and provide an opportunity to improve cancer care at both individual and system levels. The CIC-Cancer project brings VBHC into cancer care in public and private settings in WA, using standardised datasets measuring clinical and patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) developed by the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM).
Methods:
This project involves consumers, clinicians, health services and researchers to measure outcomes important to patients using ICHOM datasets for breast, prostate, colorectal and lung cancer, and develop related datasets for less common and poorer outcome ovarian cancer patients. Through identification and development of data capture tools; implementation of an informatics platform to capture, analyse and export data determining patient outcomes for a given diagnosis and treatment; evaluation and reporting of data; and development of a state/national initiative for benchmarking cancer outcome measures, the project seeks to drive improvements in care and patient outcomes.
Findings:
This is the first time that VBHC processes have been implemented simultaneously across multiple hospitals within public and private healthcare sectors. This process will highlight the challenges and solutions to address differences in ICT integration, data privacy, patient/consumer engagement, affordability and longer-term system appetite to embrace the concept and integrate it into the wider range of hospital-based services.
Conclusion:
Through examining cost-benefits and health outcomes associated with patients, this project can provide a model of healthcare to improve outcomes across a number of major cancer types.