With the understanding that patient education about palliative care is an important component of oncology care, this practice implemented an APP-Physician model to provide this education. Risk-stratification assessment tools establish baseline metrics related to deficits in the areas of nutrition, psychosocial, performance and mental status changes, skin breakdown, fall risks, incontinence risk, and treatment tolerance, as well as existing co-morbidities. Providers then use these outcome measurements to make patient-specific, safe treatment decisions about chemotherapy, immunotherapy, surgery, and/or radiation.
As the landscape of medicine changes in terms of treatment options, modalities, delivery methods, and patient populations, a failure to shift clinical thinking and practices can create a stagnancy that causes healthcare providers to miss the most basic patient needs. Cancer Care Associates of York in York, Pa. came to understand that we were treating patients following a one-size-fits-all model. In 2018, as a newly enrolled practice in the Oncology Care Model (OCM), we quickly realized that our patients were not one-size-fits-all, and that each deserved individualized care tailored to his or her specific cancer diagnosis, treatment-related symptoms, existing comorbidities, age, social determinants of health, and high-risk disease and/or symptom status, including the need for palliative care to address treatment toxicities.
