Health care systems worldwide are in the midst of an historic transition. To achieve the best outcomes for patients, whilst curbing costs, a shift is underway to a more transparent, value-based approach to service delivery, payment, and policy.

Our PROJECT

The Patients First: Continuous Improvement in Care - Cancer (CIC Cancer) project is an innovative co-design program aiming to measure outcomes important to patients using the International Consortium for Health Outcome Measures (ICHOM) standard datasets for breast, prostate, colorectal and lung cancer. Related tools for ovarian cancer patients – a less common and poorer outcome disease – will also be developed.

Involving consumers, clinicians, health service providers, and leading researchers, the CIC Cancer Project seeks to bring value based healthcare (VBHC) to public and private settings in Western Australia (WA) through research that places patients first. This is being achieved through better highlighting variations in outcomes that are important for people diagnosed with cancer. The project will combine a range of clinical measures that are largely already collected with additional, patient-reported outcome measures to feed back into clinical management processes. Evaluation of this information will identify key deficits in care pathways, generate and trial new interventions, and inform health service providers – directly improving the lives of people diagnosed with cancer.

the 5 stages of the cic cancer project

  1. Engage key stakeholders to participate, and establish champions in cancer types across multiple sites

  2. . Identify and develop a web-based platform to collect clinical information from various health service providers and integrate with patient reported outcome measures

  3. Pilot test the platform developed in Stage 2 to analyse relevant information

  4.  Feedback, evaluate, and review the information captured in Stage 3

  5. Develop a state/national initiative for benchmarking cancer outcomes and inform protocols for the collection of both clinical and patient outcomes. This will enable adoption of evidence-based treatments that promote improved patient outcomes

Five-step Data Implementation Cycle