Dr Kathi Mooney Previews Oncology Hospital at Home Presentation

Kathi Mooney, PhD, RN, FAAN, of the University of Utah, described her upcoming presentation at The American Journal of Managed Care®’s Institute for Value-Based Medicine® event being held on November 2 in New York City. She also explained what she hopes attendees take away from her presentation, as well as what she hopes to learn from the other presenters.

At the University of Utah, Mooney is a distinguished professor within the College of Nursing and currently holds the Louis S. Peery and Janet B. Peery presidential endowed chair in nursing. She is also a co-leader of cancer control and population sciences at the University of Utah's Huntsman Cancer Institute.

Transcript

Could you please give a preview of your presentation, "The Oncology Hospital at Home"?

We've [Huntsman Cancer Institute] had a hospital-at-home program exclusively for cancer patients since the summer of 2018 called "Huntsman at Home." In my presentation, I'm going to provide an overview of the rationale for why we developed the program and some of the outcomes that we have found over the last 5 years.

Hospital-at-home programs do work very well for cancer patients and provide an avenue for them to be cared for in their homes. It would reduce the number of times they need to go to the emergency department to seek care for symptoms that are poorly controlled and also reduce the number of hospitalizations they experience due to side effects or disease progression.

What do you hope attendees take away from your presentation?

I hope people become excited about the possibilities. There can be new sites for cancer care, that being in the home and also in people's communities that are closer to where they live as opposed to requiring people to come at a distance or to travel through public transportation when they don't feel well, all the way to the doors of the cancer center. To be truly patient-centered, we need to bring care home.

What do you hope to learn at the IVBM from other presenters?

I'm excited that we are exploring the idea that care can be provided in the home and that not all care needs to occur in hospitals or emergency departments. I think it's an exciting session to just brainstorm what we could do at home rather than just making the default assumption as we have it now that we have to bring patients to our facilities.

One thing that we've learned from doing Huntsman at Home is that you learn much more about a patient when you visit them in the home, and you see the context of their lives, and how they are trying to address cancer in that context. We learn much more about patient needs and see them in a more holistic way.

I hope to learn from the other presentations how they are also bringing care into the home as alternates in terms of infusions and treatments that can be given at home and in terms of how we can keep tabs on patients and monitor them. One of the problems we have is that we wait until side effects and disease progression occur and are out of control rather than being more proactive to see if we can monitor patients closely at home and identify early on changes that require attention so we prevent them from needing emergency department care or hospitalization.