Advancing cancer treatment and survivorship

Feedback from the client

“At UAB, we’ve found great value in using Carevive’s tools to integrate the patient’s voice into care planning. Carevive’s tools integrated into our EHR help optimize the care team’s workflow by putting patient-reported data in front of the clinicians and help streamline coordination of care.”

Gabrielle B. Rocque, MD

Carevive and University of Alabama-Birmingham success story

Patient-centered treatment via Carevive

The University of Alabama-Birmingham, a comprehensive cancer center, needed a clinically-proven method for improving care planning and treatment management for oncology patients. After carefully evaluating the market for a modern solution, UAB selected Carevive to help create personalized and patient-friendly care plans for treatment and survivorship.

Bringing Carevive to UAB

Carevive began as a team of oncology nurses meeting with patients in survivorship clinics, so they hold a deep understanding of the needs of both oncology patients and the clinicians who work with them. Their initial focus was to provide evidence-based and personalized survivorship plans to patients; today, they offer those along with disease-specific treatment and symptom management care plans to help cancer centers meet CoC and OCM mandates.

UAB wanted to provide more robust, disease-specific care and survivorship plans to assist with advanced care planning. Their EHR, Cerner, did not offer survivorship plans and lacked the content and features they needed to improve their treatment plan workflows, so they knew an outside solution was necessary to better connect with their cancer survivors and provide more nuanced and cohesive care.

Many of the options they considered exchanged oncology data via traditional point-to-point integration, but building and maintaining these integrations required a great deal of time and effort from UAB’s IT team.

Carevive was different—they offered a fully-integrated solution embedded into clinicians’ workflows by performing their EHR integration with Redox, the leading integration-as-a-service provider. Redox assumed responsibility for building and maintaining the integration, making the project lightweight for UAB. In 2015, UAB decided to partner with Carevive to advance their oncology care and deliver exceptional treatment to patients.

Carevive‘s robust platform combines patient-reported data with disease-specific content and information from both EHR and cancer registry integration to provide patients with personalized and evidence-based treatment plans. Additionally, Carevive helps UAB comply with emerging value-based care models—MACRA’s MIPs program and APMs put increasing focus on aligning incentives and tracking metrics to support care quality and outcomes. Carevive helps UAB meet the goals by putting the patient in the driver seat, aggregating data, and incorporating it into clinicians’ workflows so they can provide data-driven and personalized care.

Integration powered by Redox

UAB was concerned that Carevive’s complex workflow would require extensive time, testing, and technical work to deliver a fully-integrated solution. However, Carevive brought in Redox as an integration partner to streamline the integration project.

Unlike traditional projects, Redox’s conforms to health system specifications and leverages existing infrastructure. This strategy means no custom interfaces were required, making the project technically lightweight for both UAB and Carevive.

UAB and Carevive used Redox’s standardized JSON data models to exchange clinical data via a single connection. Carevive was able to receive important patient information stored in the EHR such as diagnosis, staging start date, and hormone regimens. Finally, they push back the treatment and survivorship plans to the patient’s chart in their instance of Cerner. This process is done in real time to ensure clinicians have access to critical information as part of their workflow.

Results, returns, and future care

UAB is now able to provide smarter navigation, risk stratification, care planning, and palliative care solutions to stay more closely connected with their patients and provide better quality care at lower costs.

For more on Carevive and their platform, click here. To read further about UAB and their health center, please click here.