Abstract
Background/Aims While many women turn to the Internet to obtain information, it is unlikely that unstructured internet use provides optimal benefit to women newly diagnosed with breast cancer, due to uneven quality, conflicting claims, redundancy, and search engine idiosyncrasies which may make finding desired information more difficult. To answer the need for information and support, an Interactive Cancer Communication System (“CHESS”) was developed, validated in several randomized trials, and is now being implemented to provide access to integrated information for decision-making, behavior change, and emotional support. We implemented a program to offer CHESS to all newly-diagnosed breast cancer patients as part of standard care (not as part of a research study) at two Denver healthcare systems: Kaiser Permanente Colorado (KPCO), and Exempla Health Care (EHC), which serves a larger proportion of minorities and those without insurance.
Methods All women who receive a breast cancer diagnosis at KPCO and EHC are to be offered access to CHESS during or very shortly after notification of their diagnosis and throughout the treatment process, thus making CHESS a part of standard care for hundreds of breast cancer patients. By qualitatively tracking the contextual factors related to CHESS implementation by date and occurrence, and through patient and provider interviews and surveys, this study is evaluating the real-world feasibility of CHESS integration into standard care.
Results We will report on the process of real-world implementation of CHESS at KPCO and EHC, the barriers to and facilitators of integrating the CHESS resource into standard care, and the expected and final process of how CHESS was finally integrated into standard care at each institution as a case-study example. We will also report on the initial impact of CHESS integration on the breast cancer care process and on providers at each institution.
Conclusions This case-study example demonstrates how CHESS implementation is informing dissemination to other KP regions and organizations and how the evaluation and tracking process provides guidance for implementation of other programs in large organizations.
