Building a patient-centered model: Palliative medicine and cancer care.
75 Background: Palliative medicine (PM) improves outcomes for cancer patients. Still, there is limited evidence around components of an efficient, patient-centered model for integrating PM into oncologic care. While PM is committed to aligning with a patient's goals of care, very few programs incorporate their input into design or evaluation. The aim of this project is to combine best practice in PM with perspectives of patients, families and providers to develop an empathic PM service. We hypothesize that collaboration with stakeholders and user experience experts will result in a feasible, impactful and translatable model of care that aligns with patient and family goals. Methods: We are conducting semi-structured interviews with 30 patients, family members and 30 oncologists. Patient interviews assess needs and coping mechanisms. Provider interviews assess perceptions and experiences around PM. We will conduct observations to understand how patients and providers interact and how current protocols are operationalized. Data will be coded and analyzed for major themes. An expert panel of patients, family members, health care providers and design experts will assimilate the data and make recommendations for the prototype care model design. The model will be piloted and evaluated in fall 2014. Outcome metrics include patient satisfaction, symptom management, utilization, mortality, and others identified during development. Data from the pilot will inform intervention improvements in preparation for a large-scale, 12- month pilot in an outpatient PM clinic. Results: Preliminary work includes the development of a novel patient and family interview protocol that integrates cutting-edge research on PM with best practices for conducting empathic interviews. We will present initial results from these interviews at the symposium, as well as our iterative design process. Conclusions: This project integrates data on patient and family experience with known best practices to develop a patient-centered model for palliative cancer care. The development process and potential outcomes hold significant promise for the design of patient and provider-centered care models, especially those related to chronic and serious illnesses.