Standardization of oral chemotherapy delivery to improve patient safety: A pilot study.
90 Background: Oral chemotherapy (OC) presents unique challenges to patient safety. In contrast with parenteral chemotherapy, patient education and comprehension are crucial to the safe administration of OC, appropriate toxicity interventions and patient adherence. At Trillium Health Partners we identified a lack of standardization to OC education and monitoring, that resulted in gaps in patient care. Using the American Society of Clinical Oncology/Oncology Nursing Society 2013 chemotherapy safety standards as guidance, we developed and piloted a multi-disciplinary oral chemotherapy care pathway (OCCP) to improve the approach to education and monitoring of patients newly started on OC. Methods: Patients newly started on OC between 03/15–06/15 were enrolled by 2 participating physicians representing a predominantly lung/GI practice. Baseline data was abstracted retrospectively in the 3 months prior to the pilot to reflect all study participants. The OCCP included in-person and telephone assessments by an oncology pharmacist and nurse over 2 cycles of OC. Pilot outcomes included pharmacy interventions, dose modification for toxicity, medication errors, the percent of prescriptions on computerized physician order entry (CPOE), adherence documentation and comprehension of treatment plan. Results: The pilot enrolled 20 patients and compared them against 21 baseline patients. During the pilot there were improvements in the percentage of patients who had pharmacy interventions, documentation of adherence and assessment of comprehension of the treatment plan as well as a reduction in dose modifications due to toxicity (Table 1). Conclusions: Use of a newly developed oral chemotherapy care pathway demonstrated both feasibility as well as improvements in a variety of key patient safety indicators. These results suggest that implementation of a standardized oral chemotherapy care pathway can feasibly improve patient safety outcomes. [Table: see text]