Survivor and Clinician Assessment of Survivorship Care Plans for Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation Patients: An Engineering, Primary Care, and Oncology Collaborative for Survivorship Health

Abstract

The long-term care of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) survivors poses special challenges owing to a myriad of possible chronic and/or late complications. Survivorship care plans (SCPs) have been proposed as tools to communicate information on the late effects of treatment and recommended follow-up care to clinicians and survivors. The primary aims of this study were to determine SCP content and format, as well as to assess the preferred timing of SCP provision following HSCT. HSCT survivors and nontransplantation clinicians (oncologists and primary care physicians) were invited to participate in a survey evaluating the usefulness and utility of a sample HSCT-specific SCP with a treatment summary generated by autopopulation from an electronic health record (EHR). All participating HSCT survivors (n = 29) and clinicians (n = 18) indicated a desire to receive an SCP. More than 85% of the participants perceived information about treatments received, recommended follow-up and health maintenance including vaccinations, survivor and clinician resources, and graft-versus-host disease and other late/chronic side effects to be useful. The majority of survivors also believed that care team contact information was useful. In addition, >85% of survivors and clinicians agreed that the SCP increased their understanding of treatments and chronic/late side effects, improved health care provided, and were satisfied with the SCP and found it understandable and easy to use. The majority of survivors indicated that additional information should be added to the SCP, whereas some clinicians deemed the SCP too long. Survivors preferred to receive the SCP as a paper document at the end of a regular follow-up visit and review it with a cancer clinician, whereas clinicians preferred to receive the SCP through the EHR. These findings will help improve the design of future SCPs for use by HSCT survivors and clinicians. Future work will include leveraging the EHR to ease the burden of creating user-centered documents.

Keywords: Clinician satisfaction; Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation; Survivor satisfaction; Survivorship care plan.

Figure1.

Usefulness of SCP content. On the x-axis: 1, very useful; 2, somewhat useful; 3, neutral; 4, not very useful; 5, not at all useful; 6, don’t include. *Missing 1 response (n = 26). UWCCC, University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center.

Figure2.

SCP utility and satisfaction. On the x-axis: 1, strongly agree; 2, agree; 3, neither agree nor disagree; 4, disagree; 5, strongly disagree; 6, no opinion. *Missing 1 response (n = 26).