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Reducing Disparities Through the Implementation of Digital Health Solutions in the Community Oncology Practice Setting
Debra Patt, MD, MPH, MBA,Texas Oncology, Dallas, TX, implemented digital health solutions across a large practice, aiming to better understand which patient populations use these tools over time and characterize engagement across populations to enhance clinical informatics solutions that support care delivery
Transcript
My name is Dr Debra Patt, and I'm an executive vice president of Texas Oncology part of the US Oncology Network. I'm privileged today to give an oral presentation on digital healthcare solutions and their implementation in Texas Oncology. The global pandemic has been really a catalyst for digital healthcare solutions, and we've tracked our implementation of nurse navigation, electronic patient reported outcomes tools, the patient portal and digital education being pushed out to patients.
We've tracked this in over 300,000 instances across our patients over the last two years, to better understand which patient populations use these tools over time. A lot of the reason why we were interested in asking this question is because digital healthcare tools can often be criticized, that maybe they won't be useful to patients in rural areas, or maybe they won't be useful to older patients.
What we found in our analysis is that all patient populations in every age demographic, whether they were rural or urban, whether they were racial or ethnic minorities, and even whether they spoke English as their first language or not, they used our digital health care solutions to navigate their cancer care journey. This was really meaningful for us.
And in fact, what we found is that the largest cohort of utilization was in the over 65 age group, suggesting that these tools are incredibly useful for the sweet spot of the patients we serve and that some of our preconceived notions about how digital health care could augment people's cancer journey maybe were not accurate. That these digital health care tools are in fact useful tools to navigate care delivery for all of the patients we serve.
I think as we take from this the understanding that these tools are useful for all patients, we now recognize that there are some enhancements that we can use to make sure that ethnically vulnerable patient populations, and also patients that don't speak English as their first language could use additional enhancements to make them more useful. But even as they are, these are useful tools for patients to navigate their health care journey.
I'm also just excited to share the information of others as we all look at digital healthcare as an important way in which we augment care delivery and really the pandemic has been a catalyst. Thank you so much for your attention today and sharing in these important initiatives.
