Working Together for Improved Cancer Outcomes

Debra Patt, M.D., Ph.D., MBA, a practicing oncologist and breast cancer specialist in Austin, Texas, and an executive vice president of Texas Oncology, who also serves on the ASCO Board of Directors, explains that Texas Oncology has been using patient navigation pathways for about 5 years.

“They really impact our patients in 2 ways.One, when patients call in for symptom management, it allows our nurses who predominantly work remotely to triage patients by using care pathways that have been co-developed with the vendor team and the oncology nursing society. In doing that it allows them to have faster response times to patients.The second way is that we’re using an app called a patient reported outcomes instrument or a health tracker, if you will. But a patient reported outcomes instrument so patients can track their symptoms when they’re on a new therapy that again gets fed into our triage nurses that use pathways and interaction with the clinical team like the doctors to try to understand how to manage patients. One might ask, why do you need to make an investment like this? Whenever patients call in with symptoms, or complain about symptoms that they might put on their EPRO app and push it in, there’s a lot of variability between practices in terms of the time it takes for patients to get a call back from nurses to help guide and direct them how to manage their symptoms, and that can be quite dangerous, because it can be anywhere from an immediate response to 2 to 3 days before patients get a response. So, you can imagine those longer wait times.

If you have a symptom and you have cancer, and you’re on a therapy that can be problematic, especially if you have fever, diarrhea, nausea, you need those symptoms to be managed faster. The short answer is, it allows us to have our patient symptoms managed much faster with this collaboration. Texas Oncology tracks that and other metrics of how we manage patient symptoms every month as a key performance indicator. It’s how we benchmark our success at meeting patients’ needs in this way. Last month Texas Oncology was at 40 min on average, between the time that patients call in or notify us of symptoms, and the time that they’re talking to a nurse to discuss symptom management. And so, I’m incredibly proud of that. I think it’s really meaningful.

We have demonstrated previously that when we implement these tools in patient care, that there is a decrease in ER visits and hospitalizations and total cost of care. So, I think that’s really meaningful and in alignment with our goal as a practice to deliver the highest quality of cancer care close to home, which is Texas Oncology’s mission, and in our collaboration with Canopy, I’m further excited because I feel like they have a really efficient way to use our nurse resources to decrease their administrative burden. We’ve observed in our five-year experience in doing this, that our nurses spend a lot of time in the documentation burden of care delivery in addition to the time they spend in direct, patient care, and we want to make sure that they’re operating at the top of license in direct, patient care more often.

So, if I could say that they spent 50% of their time on administrative efforts and 50% on direct patient care, previously, our goal with canopy is that split is more like an 80/20 that they’re able to decrease their burden of time on the administration and documentation of how they’re managing patients, and really more time in that care delivery piece.”

Dr. Patt states that the implications for them are that they want for patient symptoms to be better controlled. They want patients to have the best experience possible. She says all the time that she wants to make sure that cancer doesn’t take their life and cancer therapy doesn’t take their livelihood. That should be their goal as community oncologists to make care delivery as easy as possible for the patients they serve. And so that’s really central to their mission in every location, whether it’s in El Paso, Amarillo, McAllen, Longview, Austin, or Dallas. So big city, rural city, all of the above, they want to make sure that that’s a consistent experience across the patients they serve. What’s in it for them is they want patients to know that this is the level of service that they get from Texas Oncology, that they can count on their clinical teams to address their symptoms as rapidly as possible. Canopy has been a great partner in helping the,m innovate in this space to meet the needs that they have as a practice to deliver upon this promise that they give to patients.

Dr. Patt believes that as Canopy continues to grow as a company, it’s clear that they are invested in meeting the needs of a practice to manage patient symptoms faster in ways that are easier for the practice. She thinks that that will allow them to continue to grow as a vendor, as they’ve clearly demonstrated their proficiency in helping Texas Oncology meet their goals. So they’ve been great partners in that regard.

“Cancer care is going to look a lot different in 2 years from now than it does today, because I think that the use of AI and digital tools will really be present at every piece of care delivery. And so, making sure that that’s used responsibly to help our assets meaning our nurses and our doctors be more efficient and effective, is really critical. And so, Canopy uses AI to do that. So, the reason why the documentation burden is decreased to our nurses is because Canopy is using AI to populate some of the notes to patients and to some of the documentation into the medical record. And so it’s not using AI as a mandate. I think that it’s using AI as clinical decision support, right? Which I think is the best way to use AI when you’re talking about how it interacts with clinicians. So, it’s decision support. It’s offering choice architecture, and how those pathways are engaged, and how that populates information that goes out to the patient and is documented in the medical record, and that’s really, in my opinion, the cause of that shift of the administrative burden onto our nurses and the administrative burden on our nurses is a problem on many fronts. I think first, you want your nurses to act at top of license because you want them to be efficient and effective. But second, it’s really ungratifying as a nurse to be in the thick of the administrative burden all the time. They didn’t go to nursing school to be secretaries, and so we need to decrease their administrative burden and make it easier for them. So, the use of AI that Canopy is using right now to complete some of those administrative functions by using clinical decision support is really best in class, in my opinion.” – Dr. Patt explains.

Dr. Patt states that Texas Oncology always continues to grow, and she thinks that they will continue to grow faster the better care that they deliver to patients. And so again, it’s in alignment with their mission. Texas Oncology will deliver the best quality of cancer care to patients close to home. It allows them to be true to that promise, and by taking great care of patients they will continue to grow.

“There are a lot of vendors in this space, and I think practices will navigate a lot of vendors in this space, moving forward for a lot of different functionalities, not just patient symptom management, but also patient bill pay, financial counseling help with socioeconomic issues, clinical decision support, how we think about next generation sequencing, all kinds of different initiatives. As you think about that broadly, I think of it as sort of practices have to envision this path to Nirvana, this being a journey to great healthcare, to the patients that we serve, and on that path to Nirvana, and I say Nirvana because Nirvana is ever changing and we’re never actually going to get there, but you have a lot of vendors that you can interact with on the way, sort of as stopping points on that journey. I think canopy is really an important vendor in that space. Again, because they’re bringing to the table, modern technology to use things that nurses have done for a really long time in an efficient and effective way. So, I’m familiar with a lot of the vendors in this space. I’ve seen a lot of their platforms. And again, I think Canopy is the best in class, and I think they’re really in it with us to continue to innovate for our practice, and deliver to patients what they need.” – Dr. Patt believes.

Dr. Patt says that as practices envision how they make strategic investments in digital healthcare solutions, particularly as they incorporate AI, it’s not only important to think about vendor selection as someone is best in class, but also someone that’s going to help you change as an organization, because in her experience people think all the time that it’s vendor selection that’s the hard part, envisioning sort of your stops on that journey to Nirvana. But she tells that’s actually the easiest part. The hardest part is getting your organization to change because you have to change in order to optimally utilize these systems, and you want someone that’s in it with you for change management. And so, Canopy has been a great partner. As they continue to evolve and look at the solutions we need for the next generation of cancer therapies, she’s really grateful for that. And I think practices really need to consider that, as they think about who they will partner with to sort of navigate their journey.

In this conversation, Dr. Debra Patt details how Texas Oncology leverages Canopy’s platforms—focusing on patient navigation pathways and AI-driven symptom management—to ensure that patients receive prompt, high-quality care. By streamlining administrative processes for nurses and making smart use of clinical decision support, the collaboration demonstrates promising strides in reducing emergency visits, lowering costs, and delivering care in a consistent, responsive manner.

Further Reading: Canopy and Texas Oncology Announce Multi-Year Partnership to Improve Patient Outcomes