Silverline believes in taking a patient journey approach to oncology navigation. The journey doesn’t start with diagnosis, but rather with educating PCP’s, Specialists, ambulatory facilities, and consumers about the programs and services available if a patient or a consumer is suspected to have cancer.  

Patients should not feel like they have to navigate cancer alone, but rather have a nurse navigator and a care team to hold their hand every step of the way.  They should have access to all of the resources needed to make the journey as efficient and effective as possible while providing a single point of contact for the patient, their caregivers, and family.

Here are some high-level categories to consider when choosing an oncology patient navigation application.  

Patient Acquisition

• One key to a successful program is identifying navigation candidates at the suspicious lesion stage.  This allows for early intervention and establishment of the care team and planned journey.
• Defining your healthcare organization’s provider network is critical.  Understanding a patient’s clinical touchpoints prior to diagnosis allows for robust marketing and education to potential referring providers.
• Integration of marketing automation software allows for website tracking and targeted marketing efforts to ensure candidate patients are knowledgeable about the organization’s services.
  

Provider Network Management

• Defining and building provider and facility profiles allow for the seamless navigation of oncology patients throughout the system, ensuring that patients are referred within the network and all unique attributes of their journey (barriers to care, support system, care team, etc.) are shared with the team.
• This also includes defining those ancillary care team members including dieticians, genetic counselors, social workers, and community-based resources.
• At a minimum, your application should allow for tracking engagement, marketing and educational efforts with your care team members.
• If possible, scheduling should be consolidated in the application to provide a seamless patient navigation experience for the nurse navigator and/or non-clinical patient navigators.

Care Navigation

• As cancer care has transitioned from an acute episode to a chronic disease, treatment has become more complex.  
• Most healthcare organizations operate virtual cancer centers with care providers and facilities in different locations and often on different EHR’s.  
• Nurse Navigator programs are necessary to navigate patients through prevention, screening, diagnosis treatment while accounting for a patient’s barriers to care, support system and educational needs.
• Referral Management is also a key component because many of the imaging and treatment facilities are siloed and the referral decisions can be made by multiple providers on the care team.  A strong referral management framework increases patient satisfaction and downstream revenue.
• Care Team members are both clinical (RN’s, Social Workers) and non-clinical (Referral Coordinators, Lay Navigators).
• Support for Oncology Care Model from Medicare in which healthcare organizations can choose to participate.  

Patient Navigation Tool

Choosing the right software application for nurse navigation is essential to the success of an oncology program.  Silverline has created a Care Management Pathway on Health Cloud that serves as the driving record for patient journeys like cancer navigation.  It is customizable for healthcare organizations and other patient journey use cases and is integrated to Marketing Cloud for coordinating patient engagement between the patient/caregiver and the care team.  It also includes assessments, services, knowledge articles, provider search and appointment scheduling. These components provide the framework for navigating patients on a journey from suspected cancer to recovery/remission or hospice.

In summary, Silverline can help organizations build the tools to provide care navigation for oncology patients, as well as, manage referrals, perform nurse triage, manage a provider network, manage a risk-based population and much more.  Wherever you start, Silverline has the tools and the experience to help you be successful.

To learn more about Silverline’s Healthcare Expertise, contact us today.