Minnesota Oncology Is Improving the Ability to Capture Data on Social Needs, Distress

Rajini Katipamula-Malisetti, MD, of Minnesota Oncology discussed initiatives Minnesota Oncology is implementing to continue improving patient care. Katipamula-Malisetti is a physician in the Medical Oncology & Hematology department, her areas of special interest being gastrointestinal oncology, breast cancer, cancer genetics, and lung cancer. She also was the chair of The American Journal of Managed Care^®’s Institute for Value-Based Medicine^® event in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on September 12, 2023.

Transcript

What are you, or Minnesota Oncology, currently working on that you're excited to share?

There's so much that we need to do. I mean, we do a lot of things, but there's still things that we can do better, we can improve. One of the things we have found that we are doing a great job on is really understanding that need for assessment of social distress and how to address it.

We have been using the NCCN [National Comprehensive Cancer Network] distress tool, but are we really capturing what the patients are needing? So, we are starting to do some work in that area.

We're also trying to put a group together to address our health-related social needs. There's just so many needs that the patients have that sometimes when I'm seeing my patient in 30 minutes that I'm not able to address, but how do you really capture that? How do I provide the best care in all realms for the patients? Those are things that we are working on and that I'm excited about. Hopefully, we'll be able to do better things for our patients.

Those 2 are kind of our 2 big things that we're working on, working on a distress thermometer; how do we roll it out? How do we capture? How do we intentionally make sure that the patient is getting benefited from that? Then, a health-related social and equity need. We're putting a workgroup together for that and hopefully come up with some action plan to determine, again, what is the need? How do we address the need? How do we address the gaps? What resources do we pull? Again, with more of an intention rather than to check a box. I think I feel like any of this quality work, unless we say, we want to do it, we have a plan to do it, and we really want to improve with that intentionality, I don't think we can really see a change.

Those 2 are kind of our big goals, we do have an excellent palliative care program. We are in a grant where we were one of the first practices to hire an outpatient chaplain to address spiritual needs for the patient. That's something that we'd like to see us continuing, that's exciting to have her on board, but can we support it? We don't know how long. Those are things that are exciting that help improve patient care but things that we're working on.