Leveraging Health Systems to Increase Implementation of Evidence-based Surgical Cancer Care

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PROJECT SUMMARY Hospitals are increasingly consolidating into health systems with shared ownership and management. Care in a health system has potential benefits for surgical cancer patients including improved access, care coordination, and strategies to disseminate and implement a rapidly evolving evidence-base into practice across system hub and spoke sites. Prior research has demonstrated that these potential benefits remain elusive. The impact of consolidation on quality varies widely, and there are disparate outcomes for surgical cancer patients treated at different facilities in the same systems. We have shown that location of surgical cancer care determines whether effective treatments are adopted (implementation) or ineffective treatments discontinued (de- implementation). We hypothesize that health system characteristics and strategies are associated with variability in implementation of oncologic evidence among hub and spoke hospitals and that through exploration of observed differences we will identify levers for targeted, multi-level interventions. This work addresses the NIH Blueprint objective to enhance research investments by ensuring adoption into practice and targets rural individuals, a population with disparate healthcare access and outcomes, who are often treated at spoke hospitals. We will examine the influence of treatment for common cancers in health system hubs and spokes on patient access and receipt of evidence-based care by linking SEER-Medicare data with health system data. Then, we will identify health system characteristics associated with evidence implementation, both quantitatively using multilevel modeling and qualitatively through structured interviews with health system stakeholders. Finally, we will use the resources within our Health System at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) to develop a system-level intervention for dissemination and implementation of oncologic evidence across hub and spoke sites. My long-term goal is to become an independent investigator who improves the quality of cancer care delivery by designing, implementing and studying health system-level interventions to increase clinical adoption of oncologic evidence. Through this training award, I will complement my health services and quality improvement science expertise with advanced training in the organization of healthcare delivery, multilevel analysis of secondary data, and implementation science to develop a system-level intervention to improve evidence-based surgical cancer care.