THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR RADIATION ONCOLOGY published a new template that standardizes and streamlines the creation of patient-focused plans for long-term cancer survivor care following radiation therapy.
The template and related research papers, “Development of a Standard Survivorship Care Plan for Radiation Oncologists” and “U.S. Radiation Oncology Practice Patterns for Post-Treatment Survivor Care,” are published in Practical Radiation Oncology, the official clinical journal of ASTRO.
The template was developed to coordinate post-treatment care for cancer survivors among the various contributors to their care, including primary care providers and oncology specialists, as well as patients.
The framework also helps practices meet new accreditation requirements set by the American College of Surgeons Commission on Cancer. In response to a 2006 recommendation from the Institutes of Medicine that cancer patients be provided with a survivorship care plan following treatment, CoC issued a mandate that cancer programs provide SCPs for all curative cancer patients by 2019 to maintain accreditation.
The new requirement may necessitate changes for the majority of radiation oncology programs, according to data from a March 2014 survey of ASTRO members. The survey found that only 40 percent and 19 percent of respondents used SCPs for curative and palliative patients, respectively. Primary barriers to implementation included cost and the lack of a standardized, comprehensive SCP framework suited to patients who received RT. Nearly 80 percent of the RT providers that reported using SCPs relied on a framework developed internally within their practice, indicating that different patients may receive different types of information depending on where they receive treatment.
“This two-page template facilitates consistency in SCPs across the discipline and also reduces the time and effort required by providers to complete each individual plan,” said Ronald Chen, an associate professor in radiation oncology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lead author on the manuscript that includes the template.
“The field of radiation oncology has a long tradition of creating treatment summaries for each patient, even before the Institute of Medicine recommended survivorship care plans in 2006. This radiation-oncology specific template will serve a dual purpose as both a traditional radiation oncology treatment summary and a plan for survivorship care that meets CoC requirements – thus reducing the burden on radiation oncologists from having to create two documents for each patient.”
Chen was the chair of ASTRO’s Clinical, Translational and Basic Science Advisory Committee, the group that examined current adoption levels of SCPs and developed the template to standardize them in the future.
