PROTEUS — PRACTICE
Implementing a Care Delivery Model to Improve PRO Guided Care for Patients with Brain Tumors
West Virginia University, Sonikpreet Aulakh (Principal Investigator)
Here you can learn more about the “Implementing a Care Delivery Model to Improve PRO Guided Care for Patients with Brain Tumors,” which is part of the PROTEUS Learning Health Network. The Learning Health Network is focused on improving the use of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in oncology clinical practice. Also, you can read about the valuable insights that have emerged from their participation in the Learning Health Network.
Sonikpreet Aulakh, MD
Project Overview
We are looking at the effectiveness of having a rehabilitation professional, an occupational therapist (OT), embedded in a brain tumor clinic. The OT is assessing brain tumor-specific patient-reported outcomes to better assess functional deficits and streamline a referral process for rehabilitation services.
Learning Health Network Experience
The Learning Health Network has helped us to understand opportunities to overcome some of our own implementation barriers as we have learned from others in the network. We have also incorporated some of the ideas that were shared from others in the Learning Health Network.
The Learning Health Network has additionally provided us with this unique opportunity to collaborate between different subspecialties to help patients in rural America. Our collaboration has provided meaningful benefits to patients with brain cancers. These benefits not only help improve their daily functional abilities but also have the potential to improve survival.
We were able to have a clinical occupational therapist be present in the clinic on the same day as the NeuroOncologist to evaluate patients in real time. We were able to utilize medical assistants and nurses to ask relevant questions prior to either of us seeing the patients. We are currently in the final stages of getting PROs installed in Epic for our brain tumor patients.