Assessing Patients' Perceptions of Cancer Care Coordination in a Community-Based Setting

Purpose: Effective care coordination (CC) is a hallmark of a high-quality cancer care. However, efforts to improve cancer care delivery are limited by the lack of a clinically useful tool to assess CC. In this study, we examined patients' perceptions of cancer CC using a novel tool, the Care Coordination Instrument (CCI), and evaluated the quality of the CCI.

Methods: The CCI is a 29-item patient questionnaire that assesses CC across varied practice settings and patient populations overall and for three critical domains of CC: communication, navigation, and operational. We conducted univariable and multivariable regression analyses to identify patient clinical and practice characteristics associated with optimal versus suboptimal CC.

Results: Two hundred patients with cancer completed the CCI questionnaire between October 2018 and January 2019, of whom 189 were used for the analysis. The presence of a family caregiver and a diagnosis of a blood cancer were correlated with overall positive reports of CC ( < .001 and < .05, respectively). Poorer perceptions of CC were associated with having a head and neck cancer and the absence of family caregiver support. The effects of cancer disease stage and having access to a patient navigator on CC were not statistically significant.

Conclusion: Integrating a patient-centered tool to assess cancer CC can be a strategy to optimize cancer care delivery. Understanding factors associated with effective and ineffective CC can help inform efforts to improve overall quality of care and care delivery.