Marcy, Winget, Cancer, research, data mapping, colorectal, wait times
Alberta Cancer Board's Dr. Marcy Winget works to get a better handle on waiting times for colorectal cancer diagnosis and treatment.
Mapping data to speed colorectal cancer diagnosis and treatment
When you’re stuck in traffic, you only know you’re not moving. But someone in a helicopter can tell you why. For Dr. Marcy Winget, senior outcomes analyst with the Alberta Cancer Board’s division of Population Health and Information, the discussion of cancer patient wait times lacks this important helicopter perspective.
“We have lots of snapshots of radiation wait times and lots of snapshots of waits for surgery, but that doesn’t begin to capture the patient experience which begins before diagnosis,” says Winget.
If we don’t capture the full journey, she says, fixes are likely to miss the mark and discussion of the problems will remain anecdotal.
“People are always talking about the exception to the rule,” says Winget. “It’s not a constructive discussion and it prevents a decision being made. We need to find out what the rule is, how often there are exceptions and why.”
Winget intends to follow streams of colorectal patient data collected by multiple agencies to map the full suite of services for colorectal cancer, from pre-diagnosis through treatment and for some patients, end-of-life care to identify the major cancer care trajectories experienced by patients.
She’ll begin by building a six-year baseline from 2000 to 2005, which can be used to test the impact of changes to the system, such as the new colorectal cancer screening program.
“I want to engage clinicians in conversations on whether or not these times are reasonable to help us develop targets for what’s appropriate,” says Winget.
The next phase will involve finding roadblocks in the system and determining the costs and benefits of changes to address them.
Winget will track end-of-life care through the province’s two largest health regions where numerous providers offer a wide range of services. “We know there have been some studies on the benefits of home care, for instance,” says Winget, “but we don’t know how many are taking that route.”
When complete, Winget hopes the model will be used to study the patient experience for other cancers. She also hopes it will move discussion from wait times to more meaningful examinations of timeliness and appropriateness of care, much like you’d discuss total travel time rather than focusing on a portion of the trip spent stuck in traffic.
She’s been told the complexity of analyzing data on thousands of patient records, some paper, some electronic, through countless agencies sounds like a life’s work. “I tend to take on way more than I can chew,” she laughs. “The challenge is to stay at a high enough level that I don’t drown in the details.”
Winget came from the U.S. as part of Alberta’s brain gain and completed her PhD in Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins. This type of study is only possible in publicly-funded health systems, she says, and then only if a wide variety of agencies share information.
“I’m hoping this can be a first step toward creating a better model than we have today—a better way to improve the overall patient care experience.”
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Moving Evidence to Application : A Three Province Cancer Collaborative -- Read the reports:
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