It's Time to Prioritize Quality of Care

Meetings like ASCO give us a unique opportunity to come together as a community to look beyond the data and think about how we should define quality of care in a rapidly-changing healthcare delivery landscape. Here are a few ways we think about quality of care.

Ask a hundred people with cancer what “quality of care” means to them and you’ll likely get a hundred different answers. That’s because cancer isn’t a single disease—it is many diseases that affect people in many different ways.

And “care” isn’t just about medicines. It is about managing the overall well-being and experience of people living with cancer. Defining quality of care for everyone with cancer, or even everyone with a single type of cancer, is difficult because it depends not only on the type of cancer, but also each person’s individual situation.

Injecting the patient’s voice

The quality of care definition is beginning to evolve. A recent Institute of Medicine report outlined a new vision that puts patients at the center of a high-quality cancer care delivery system. Its framework includes several interconnected components, including a focus on engaged patients.

It is something we feel strongly about, and our vision for quality of care aligns closely with this. We want to ensure that individual patient experiences and preferences, which are constantly changing with the availability of new options like personalized treatments, emerging technologies and increased access to information, are included in today’s complex healthcare system.

We want to create measurements that reflect not only the best clinical outcomes, such as longer life and safer treatments, but also the outcomes that are most meaningful to people experiencing the disease, like managing pain or facilitating better care coordination among those providing care and treatment to patients.

We’ve already seen the positive effects of striking this balance in caring for stroke patients.

People experiencing a stroke require care from specialized doctors who may be difficult to find. A recent study we presented in partnership with Premier Healthcare Alliance found that when small hospitals used telemedicine to consult with stroke experts, more people suffering an acute stroke received the right treatment within a critical window of time.

For doctors treating stroke, quality of care is defined by solving an access issue with new technology: getting patients a specific treatment as quickly and safely as possible. And for stroke patients and their loved ones, providing quality care can mean reduced or no disability because they received the appropriate treatment when they needed it.

To make progress in cancer, we have to redefine how we measure quality of care and ensure that these measurements and practices – from using diagnostic tests to helping the patient community navigate our healthcare system – are consistently implemented to improve the quality of cancer care. And we have to start by understanding what really matters to patients.

To build a useful quality of care framework, we need to continuously listen carefully to people living with the disease and use these insights to redefine how we measure success and how we deliver care to people living with cancer.

Harnessing the power of the network

Today we have an opportunity to engage patients like never before. The Internet has revolutionized the way people with cancer and other illnesses share their experiences, creating new places for patients to share, learn and connect. These online communities are powerful platforms for patients to share information about their disease experience; and when paired with insights from patient advocacy groups, they can help us discover what matters most to patients.

Genentech recently entered into a research collaboration with PatientsLikeMe, a unique platform for people to share their real-life experiences with illnesses and treatments. Through this collaboration, we hope to learn from people living with various kinds of cancer and other serious diseases, so that we can better integrate their experiences and insights into the measurement of quality of care, and into the development of strategies for addressing barriers to quality care.

In oncology, there is a constant need for better medicines. As an industry, we need to keep patients at the center of our thinking at all times and remember to strive for better care as well.

We need to think beyond clinical endpoints. We need more initiatives to explore new ways to operate when providing and measuring care, to ensure that patients’ voices are heard right from the start.

We need to ensure that our definition of success is meaningful to doctors, to nurses and, above all, to people living with diseases like cancer. And we need to focus today on what we can do to shape the future of healthcare.

It’s a big challenge, but it’s critical we face it head on together.

Biography

Christine Gilmour is the Vice President of the Knowledge Enhancement Medical Unit, US Medical Affairs. She started her career with Genentech in 1992, working with uninsured patient programs. Over the course of her tenure, she has played a key role in shaping the evolution of the company's medical communication and healthcare compliance programs, and held multiple leadership positions in the Regulatory, Information, Safety and Quality organization within Product Development.

She has contributed to numerous cross-functional initiatives and committees that have wide reaching impact across the company and the healthcare industry. She now provides the strategic direction for Genentech’s Knowledge Enhancement Medical Unit, a department comprised of five fully integrated functions: Quality of Care and Patient Access, Medical Communications, Medical Education and Research Grants, Medical Affairs Compliance, plus Medical Operations and Business Informatics. The department is focused on improving quality of care by connecting stakeholders to evidence and insights that inform medical strategy and healthcare decisions -- while ensuring medical compliance through the North America Quality Management System.