Integrating patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) into oncology practice are valuable for enhancing person-centred care. PROMs can bring attention to various struggles patients with cancer experience, including mental health and emotional well-being needs. One challenge with incorporating PROMs into clinical practice has been assisting clinicians to better understand how PROMs responses can be used to focus on patient stories to identify and address the care needs of individual patients. This project aims to co-develop personas and journey maps with older adult cancer patients as knowledge translation (KT) tools to support clinicians’ use of PROMs in cancer care.
Background
PROMs are standardized, self-reported questionnaires that enable people to report on aspects of their physical, emotional, and social well-being that can be leveraged to facilitate improved patient-clinician communication, raising awareness of problems that would otherwise be unidentified, and fostering interprofessional collaboration. However, one challenge with incorporating PROMs into clinical practice has been assisting clinicians to better understand how PROMs responses can be used to relate to individual patient stories for identifying and addressing the care needs of individual patients.
Personas, hypothetical representations of patients, can be used as an innovative strategy to support clinicians’ use of PROMs in their practice. These personas embody patients’ life stories, making them a valuable tool for understanding the person when using PROMs. The aim of this project was to develop personas as a KT strategy to support clinicians’ use of PROMs for person-centred care.
This project was funded by the University of Victoria and CIHR Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research Grant for effective KT to better manage the cancer trajectory of patients.
See our learning module, “Incorporating Patient-Reported Outcome Measures into practice: Using personas to bring out the patient voice”, which uses personas that were co-developed with older adults with cancer to support clinicians use of PROMs in oncology practice.
To help better capture patients’ changing experiences and needs over time, we are currently conducting interviews with older cancer patients who have undergone radiation therapy. In radiation therapy for cancer, the routine use of PROMs is particularly valuable to raise awareness of various struggles patients with cancer experience during their journey, including mental health and emotional well-being needs.
Patient journey maps have the potential to address the changing needs of cancer patients during their radiation cancer journey by providing clinicians with information about the type of treatment strategies that should be developed for different groups of patients and their likely impact on various expected changes with treatment. Journey mapping is a relative new approach in health research that depicts healthcare service from the patient’s perspective (Ly et al., 2021). It is gaining increasing recognition for its ability to organize complex multifaceted data and explore interactions or a series of “touch points” between the patient and their healthcare service encounters over time (McCarthy et al., 2016; Zomerdijk & Voss, 2010). Integrating PROMs trajectories with journey mapping will provide information about patient behaviour, feelings, motivations and attitudes across the radiation therapy continuum to better understand the patient journey from the patient’s point of view. For example, what do patients experience emotionally at different stages of radiation therapy? What are their highs and lows? When are they unmotivated or uncertain about what to do? This information is critical to understanding potential barriers and opportunities for improvement along the entire patient healthcare journey and will help clinicians and policy-makers tailor and target messages and strategy to improve healthcare delivery processes and patient care experiences. We hope to address this issue by journey mapping PROMs trajectories to explore and capture compelling stories of patients’ experiences of interacting with the complex cancer healthcare system.
For more information or if you have any questions about this project please contact Jae-Yung Kwon (jykn1@uvic.ca)