Clinical Pathways for Cancer Patients
Description
The VA National Oncology Program (NOP) has invested in creating clinical pathways that guide providers to provide high quality evidence-based standard of care treatments to Veterans with cancer. However, it is currently unclear how many or how often providers are ‘on pathway’ or are concordant with this recommendation. The work will focus on leveraging AI to assess the degree of adoption of various pathways. For example, the VA NOP proposes to develop, evaluate, and implement an informatics workflow that is capable of extracting information regarding whether a Veteran with prostate cancer has been offered access to germline and somatic genetic testing. This will assess care quality across the VA in terms of genetic testing in Veterans with prostate cancer and provide the necessary information to engage in quality improvement efforts. The work will follow the framework NOP developed to assess germline genetic testing in Veterans with breast cancer, in response to the Advances in Mammography and Medical Options (MAMMO) for Veterans Act of 2022. Briefly, Veterans receiving care for prostate cancer in the VA will be identified using electronic health information in the VA Corporate Data Warehouse and their latest relevant clinical notes will be retrieved.
Detailed example
Whether a patient is on a clinical pathway and where on the clinical pathway they are
AI / analytics pattern
Natural Language Processing: AI that processes, interprets, and shares information in human language.
Automation level / stage
a) Pre-deployment – The use case is in a development or acquisition status.
Expected benefit
Increase efficiency: it will speed up providers' review of patients' treatment plans based on the National Oncology Program guideline, since patients' pathway information will be highlighted. This makes it easier for the providers to make better treatment decisions for the patient, therefore potentially improving patient outcomes.
Controls / human review
ATO: Not reported; PIA: Not published