Designing Cancer Care for Kids

Funded by: Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta
PI’s: Craig Zimring & Megan Denham

The Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center seeks to improve the patient experience, boost provider morale, and create a generalizable tool for use in other Aflac service lines and more broadly to CHOA. The program “Designing Cancer Care for Kids By Kids” engages patients as partners in care, and the children collect data about their visit with a “Passport” tool. The passport collects quantitative data about the patient visit, and qualitative data about how the kids feel at each step in the process. The results have revealed where kids spend their time waiting, and where they are unhappy or scared. The Aflac team has begun focused efforts to improve inefficient processes, such as adding another registration desk, and identifying Aflac teams who are more efficient with their care so other teams can learn from them. The Aflac team has continued to use the passport tool for additional service lines to better understand those processes.

Wasilewski-Masker, K., Sherrod, A., Bushehri, Y., Denham, M., “Designing Cancer Care for Kids, By Kids: Engaging Patients and Their Families in Creating More Efficient Patient-Centered Care”, presented at the Healthcare Design Conference in Houston, TX, Nov. 2016.

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