RWJBarnabas Health & Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey (New Jersey)

The population focus for the project includes underserved and vulnerable populations, including racial and ethnic minority groups that are low income, uninsured, underinsured or have limited access to health care screenings.

RWJBarnabas Health and Rutgers Cancer Institute are deploying key interventions to the patient/family, health care provider/care team and health care system levels. This multilevel approach aims to streamline cancer care coordination and integration, improve patient-centered communication and expand psychosocial support services through the following strategies:

Patient/Family

• Evaluate patients for SDOH and barriers upon enrollment in navigation
• Ensure a single point of contact for oncology care
• Provide patient-centered education to promote clinical trial participation
• Refer patients to psychosocial and supportive care services and resources

Provider/Care Team

• Ensure navigation outreach to primary care providers to coordinate care transition
• Enhance navigator integration into multidisciplinary care teams
• Bolster navigation skills through ongoing education on diversity, cultural needs, clinical trials and racial bias training
• Support distress screening and referral to resources
• Increase culturally specific and professional certification
• Support initiatives for Commission on Cancer accreditation

Health Care System

• Standardize roles and responsibilities, metrics and evidence-based best practices to improve quality and patient experiences
• Offer navigation orientation with quarterly education and system wide quality improvement
• Support timely assessment of psychosocial needs and services through improved policy infrastructure
• Conducts navigation orientation with quarterly education program and systemwide quality improvement project

RWJBarnabas Health and Rutgers Cancer Institute are using various platforms such as EPIC and Tableau to track and monitor select outcomes including timeliness of care, patient satisfaction, care coordination and SDOH assessments.

In addition to its evaluation efforts, the NPO will plan and implement a comprehensive cross-site program evaluation using core data elements, harmonized metrics and overall collected data. This will be used to inform future efforts and measure the impact of the initiative across grantee sites while identifying and promoting best practices.