Toward a Common Goal: Improving Safety of Oral Chemotherapy Prescribing Practices at a Jurisdictional Level.

Purpose: Extending the safety agenda from parenteral to oral chemotherapy was identified as a provincial improvement priority in the 2014-2019 Cancer Care Ontario (CCO) Systemic Treatment Provincial Plan. Elimination of handwritten prescriptions for oral chemotherapy was one of the specific goals and led to a provincial quality improvement (QI) initiative involving systemic treatment facilities across 14 regional cancer programs.

Methods: The initiative was centrally organized by CCO but locally implemented by the regional partners.

Ambulatory Toxicity Management (AToM) Pilot: results of a pilot study of a pro-active, telephone-based intervention to improve toxicity management during chemotherapy for breast cancer.

Background: Chemotherapy is associated with a significant risk of toxicity, which often peaks between ambulatory visits to the cancer centre. Remote symptom management support is a tool to optimize self-management and healthcare utilization, including emergency department visits and hospitalizations (ED+H) during chemotherapy. We performed a single-arm pilot study to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, and potential impact of a telephone symptom management intervention on healthcare utilization during chemotherapy for early stage breast cancer (EBC).

Improving the Safety and Quality of Systemic Treatment Regimens in Computerized Prescriber Order Entry Systems.

Purpose: Systemic treatment (ST) computerized prescriber order entry (CPOE) and preprinted orders (PPO) are proven to reduce errors. There is no known guidance in oncology to facilitate high-quality, accurate regimen development and review; hence, this was identified as a system-wide gap. This provincial initiative aimed to improve the quality of oncology regimens through a comprehensive review of systemic treatment (ST) regimens and the development of standards.