Healthcare Practice

Leveraging the electronic health records to measure care pathway-consistent care delivery for pediatric cancer supportive care

Principal Investigators: Dr. Lillian Sung and Dr. Paul Gibson

Co-Investigators: Dr. Donna Johnston, Dr. Lee Dupuis, Dr. Paula Robinson, Dr. Priya Patel

Project Summary: Clinical practice guideline (CPG)-consistent supportive care is a key component of high-quality care that is evidence-based. To improve CPG implementation, care pathways templates based directly on CPGs have been developed.

This project will examine current care pathway templates for supportive care and identify and prioritize actions amenable to measurement using electronic health records (EHR). The team will then develop the approach using the Epic EHR databases at three Ontario institutions. A proportion of them will be checked against the actual medical records to ensure the approach is returning the correct answer. The team will then describe whether the care provided was care pathway consistent at the three institutions.

Impact/Relevance: Creation of validated EHR queries to describe care pathway-consistent care delivery is the critical first step toward the: 1) establishment of real-time feedback regarding provision of care pathway-consistent care in a dashboard format and 2) ability to evaluate the association between care pathway-consistent care delivery and patient outcomes. Both are key components of evidence-based supportive care implementation and continuous improvement.

This project fits within evidence-informed supportive care and data-driven evaluation of unmet needs in the pediatric cancer system themes. This research is relevant to patients, families and survivors throughout Ontario, with the potential to expand research capacity in the province through efficiently measuring care pathway-consistent supportive care.