Nurse-Designed Software Innovations Are Changing the Cancer Experience

Carrie Tompkins Stricker PhD, RN

It’s no secret that oncol­ogy care is complicated. Patients face a laby­rinth of personal and financial challenges during their treatment. Treatment teams want to provide the best evi­dence-based care possi­ble, but are challenged by the staggering amount of available information and trouble­some reimbursement systems.

Carevive Systems, a company cofounded by Carrie Stricker, PhD, RN and Madelyn Herzfeld, BSN, RN, was formed in response to the need to provide more support for patients, families, and care teams.

The idea for Carevive started in 2007 after Stricker noticed a striking need for tools to help navigate the complex world of cancer care. With over 20 years of clinical practice and nursing research experience, Stricker had repeatedly witnessed her own patients’ difficulties in nav­igating through the healthcare landscape. She was inspired by the seminal Institute of Medicine 2005 report, Lost in Transition, to help address the reality that patients who weren’t receiving active treatment were “left behind” by the system.

In response, Stricker started to develop care plans to serve people transitioning from treat­ment to survivorship, but making these care plans was extremely time consuming and inef­ficient. Eventually, she realized that emerging technology offered the perfect opportunity to streamline the process. In collaboration with Herzfeld, Carevive was formed in 2013 (origi­nally as On Q Health) to help develop care plans for all phases of the cancer experience, based on current research and patient priorities. It’s currently being used in 30 healthcare systems across the country.

Stricker explained that Carevive’s mission is to “provide clinical workflow tools and patient engagement solutions to help cancer centers in providing comprehensive, value-based care to indi­viduals and families with cancer. The goal is to sup­port patients, families, and survivors in navigating their cancer experiences with optimal quality of life, and as active members of the care team.”

To that end, Carevive’s cloud-based technol­ogy consumes and analyzes EMR and other clinical data sources, such as tumor registry data, along with patient-reported health data, to support the care team in planning patients’ treatment, managing their symptoms, and sup­porting their survivorship needs. The aggregated data gathered in this process also are used to provide insight into the real-world ex­periences of patients with cancer, enabling pre­dictive analytics and to continuously improve outcomes.

Based on the information reported, patients receive a personalized treatment plan for managing their personal symptoms. These patient-specific plans are focused on such areas as pa­tient priorities, diagnostic data, evidence-based cancer treatment pathways, possible side effects, care and outcome goals, eligibility for clinical trials, and other resources.

Clinically, providers can use the reported in­formation to prioritize concerns during patient visits, encouraging better communication and collaboration between the healthcare team and the patient. The healthcare team can also use reported patient information to map out trends in symptoms, side effects, and patient outcomes. With so much of oncology care funding and reimbursement driven by census, statistics regarding patient treatment at various facilities can help drive cancer costs in a more benefi­cial direction for all.