Providers screen cancer patients for quality of life concerns

Living with cancer isn’t easy. The disease and treatment exact a tremendous toll on patients and their families.

For the past three years, 12 cancer centers in Chicago have been using a screening program that gives providers and patients resources aimed at better managing the disease and coping with the stress.

“We wanted to help people know about their resources and have access to resources that better their quality of lives,” said Michael Hennessy, CEO of the Coleman Foundation. “We have a very bad case of Second City ideals—you have to go to the Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins if you have specific types of cancer. But we wanted to make sure that the best possible quality of care was all here in Chicago,” he added.

FB01RDeveloped in 2015, the screening tool asks patients questions about an array of topics, including child-care issues, food insecurity, sleeping problems and depression. It was created by clinicians who are part of the collaborative, which includes roughly 170 doctors, nurses, advanced practitioners and social workers across the city. They relied on national, evidence-based guidelines from the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network around support services for cancer patients.

Rush University Medical Center was an early adopter. Cancer patients fill out the survey when they visit their oncologist for the first time and then take it again whenever there are changes in their condition. Patients take the survey on average about twice per year, said James Gerhart, assistant professor of behavioral sciences at Rush.

Patients largely complete the survey on paper before their appointment and the results are logged into the electronic health record by a nurse or medical assistant while he or she discusses the responses with the patient. “We want the nurse to initiate the conversation,” Gerhart said.

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