Population-Based Patient-Centric Care: Comprehensive Preventive Cancer Screening Using Health IT (TopCare)

• Cancer completion for all eligible cancers [ Time Frame: 1 year ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]
  Average cancer screening test completion rate over the 1-year follow-up period for each eligible patient in all eligible cancers (breast, cervical, colorectal)
  
  

• % of patients completing all eligible cancer screenings [ Time Frame: 1 year ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]
  Percentage of patients completing all eligible cancer screening modalities at 1-year follow-up will be compared between study arms
  
  
• Primary outcome in specified patient subgroups [ Time Frame: 1 year ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]
  1. Eligible population: prevalent (overdue at baseline) or incident (become overdue during study) cancer screening rates will be compared between study arms.
  2. Patient-physician linkage status: Analyses will be stratified to compare PCP-linked patients between study arms and practice-linked patients between study arms.
  3. Patient risk status: Patients at high risk for not completing screening will be compared between study arms.
  
  
• TopCare system measures (intervention practices) [ Time Frame: 1 year ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]
  1. Percentage of providers (PCPs and clinical population managers) in intervention practices using TOP-CARE system and percentage of eligible patients in clinician panel screened
  2. Percentage of providers (practice personnel and patient navigators) in intervention and control practices using TOP-CARE system and percentage of eligible patients assigned to provider who were contacted
  3. Percentage of eligible patients in clinician (PCP and clinical population manager) panel deferred and reasons selected
  
  

In prior NIH-funded research, the investigators have demonstrated the efficacy of an IT-based population management system to improve breast cancer screening (NCI R21 CA121908). The investigators will expand our current IT platform from this single function (breast cancer screening) to a package of cancer prevention actions (breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer screening) and examine the added benefit of population-level preventive cancer care that is directed by specific clinician knowledge of individual patient needs. Moreover, rather than compare our system to currently sub-optimal "usual care" practice, our goal is to test whether the impact of our intervention exceeds the current state-of-the-art of IT-based population management. Therefore, control group practices will receive augmented standard care defined as a population-level reminder system with automated patient contacts.

In augmented standard care control practices, the investigators will implement a system that includes: 1) a population-based perspective to identify all eligible patients overdue for screening, 2) an automated, centralized process to contact selected patients by letter, 3) a result management system that automatically tracks test scheduling and completion, 4) a web-based, easily accessible tool allowing practice personnel to contact patients not completing testing, and 5) use of patient navigators for high risk patients not responding to initial outreach. In the control arm, the process of escalating the reminder intervention from a letter, to contact by phone call, to a patient navigator, will occur in a standard algorithmic fashion without provider input. While not yet the standard of care nationwide, prior studies have proven the efficacy of such an approach. In intervention practices, the investigators will enhance augmented standard care by implementing a novel system that will enable physicians and clinical population managers to individualize care for each patient in their panel using tools to classify and organize patients by their clinical attributes. The investigators hypothesize that this personalized identification of patients by both their clinical outcome and clinical process risk status will improve the efficacy and efficiency of resource allocation decisions. The key additions to the health IT system for intervention practices will be: 1) a clinical systems IT platform to organize and present clinical data for each clinician's patient panel, 2) an accessible Web-based tool allowing clinicians (physicians and clinical population managers) to view, organize, and investigate their patient panels, and 3) a simple process where the clinician can make a tailored screening decision and designate the method of clinical intervention based upon the patient's risk profile.