Patients face many barriers to receiving cancer treatment.  

After a cancer diagnosis, patients often experience challenges related to health care access, such as a lack of transportation to get treatment, costs related to care, or other financial challenges (e.g., lost wages, childcare costs). Other challenges are associated with navigating the care system itself, like keeping track of multiple appointments or moving between health systems to access different specialists. These challenges contribute to patients not getting the care they need or experiencing problematic delays in treatment.

Patient navigation is a proven, effective intervention for improving outcomes among oncology patients, but navigators are very busy and strained for time and resources. Navigators typically come from clinical or coordination backgrounds and are not trained in data collection, reporting, or quality improvement, but they are often asked to produce data in support of program development and maintenance.

NORC collaborated with ACS to develop a standardized set of navigation metric definitions and a template for data collection and reporting. 

Metrics captured important navigation program elements like caseload, psychological assessments, time from diagnosis to treatment, and compliance with treatment plans. Twenty navigation programs from across the country participated in biannual data collection and discussion meetings to report on challenges, successes, and progress with data reporting. Each participating site began with different resources, processes, and populations of focus, and sites fine-tuned their data collection methods over time to improve processes and find the method(s) that worked for them. Along the way, NORC captured these nuances to inform future data collection and reporting guidance that serves a broad, national audience and variety of navigation program types—both clinical and community-based.