Cancer drugmaker AstraZeneca is boosting its support of the American Cancer Society’s (ACS) Patient Navigation Program for medically underserved communities with an injection of $2.8 million.
The program is a crucial part of the ACS’s on-going goal to lower health disparities in cancer treatment and comes as the charity also work with J&J’s Janssen unit on the issue. Patient navigation has been proven to increase health equity in oncology, with patient navigators do pretty much what the title says, they help navigate a patient though the complex twists and turns of cancer treatment.
“We (the ACS) and others have funded research that has assessed the impact of patient navigation on outcomes, including patient reported outcomes, and what we have been able to glean from those research studies is that patient navigation is one of the most effective ways for us to enhance equity in cancer outcomes,” American Cancer Society CEO, Dr. Karen Knudsen said in an interview.
“Patients who are navigated understand their care with more fluency—they’re more likely to complete their care on time and as planned, which we know is so important for a positive outcome. Yet, patient navigators are in short supply across the country.
"So this demonstration project has really two major goals. One is to fix the issue that exists right now, which is to ensure that there's enhanced access to patient navigators where’s there’s the greatest need and the greatest capacity for change. The long term goal is to collect those data back to develop a more durable sustainable solution for oncology patient navigation.”
To find the right recipients for the grants, the ACS put out an open call to health systems, cancer centers, community centers as well as academia to apply with with best ideas and what specific issues it needed to address.
Every location could be dealing with a different challenge in getting patients through their treatment—be it distance, travel issues, lack of insurance, language barriers to name a few. The ACS also asked for innovative and disruptive ideas. The initiative is meant to be a collaborative effort, so that every recipient can learn best practices from each other group through bi-monthly meetings.
A key point each applicant needed to address was, sustainability. If the center won this grant, how will it keep the patient navigation program going after the three-year program runs out.
The ACS received applications from over 200 cancer centers throughout the country for what was whittled down to 20 recipients. As it was not an easy application process, this just shows how desperate the need is for patient navigators.
“We understand that every catchment area in the United States has a different cancer challenge that they're trying to solve for. So it started with what's the problem we're trying to solve? They could tell us anything, we were willing to accept any of those as long as it was data driven, rational and aligned to our goals of enhancing health equity,” Knudsen said.