Survivorship Care Plans: Reaching a Benchmark and Striving to Achieve Intent

Abstract

PURPOSE: Survivorship care plans (SCPs) have been endorsed by major oncologic organizations despite challenges in implementation and unclear patient-specific benefits. In January 2020, the Commission on Cancer removed a 2018 provision that required accredited programs to deliver SCPs to eligible patients. Programs must determine whether to continue SCP use or begin de-implementation. We detail a framework to increase SCP delivery for programs continuing to provide SCPs as a component of survivorship care and suggest a patient-centered approach to evaluate continued utility amidst updated national standards. METHODS: We surveyed medical, surgical, and radiation oncologists at our academic and community sites to identify barriers to SCP use and performed a Pareto analysis to highlight the most notable barriers. We then designed an intervention that used SCP templates within the medical record, disease-specific recommendations, delegation to nonphysician staff, and provider education. We monitored our intervention via a statistical process control analysis and assessed patient perceptions of SCP usefulness via a questionnaire. RESULTS: Before implementing our process improvements, our SCP completion rate during a 10-month period was 45%. During the 6-month period after our intervention, the SCP completion rate increased to 89%. Greater than 80% of patients who had recently received an SCP found the information helpful and were satisfied with the amount of information received. More than 40% did not remember receiving their original SCP. CONCLUSION: We demonstrated a feasible method for increasing SCP delivery for all cancers across a cancer network and used a patient-specific questionnaire to assess continued value amidst changing national standards.