Delivering high-quality cancer care to all patients presents numerous challenges, including difficulties with care coordination and access. Patient navigation is a community-based service delivery intervention designed to promote access to timely diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other chronic diseases by eliminating barriers to care, and has often been proposed and implemented to address these challenges. However, unresolved questions include where patient navigation programs should be deployed, and which patients should be prioritized to receive navigation services when resources are limited.

To address these issues and facilitate discussion on how to improve navigation services for patients with cancer, the National Cancer Policy Forum of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a workshop on November 13 and 14, 2017. At this workshop, a broad range of experts and stakeholders, including clinicians, navigators, researchers, and patients, explored which patients need navigation and who should serve as navigators, and the benefits of navigation and current gaps in the evidence base.

Contents

• The National Academies of SCIENCES • ENGINEERING • MEDICINE
• WORKSHOP PLANNING COMMITTEE
• NATIONAL CANCER POLICY FORUM
• Reviewers
• Acknowledgments
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Proceedings of a Workshop
  • INTRODUCTION
  • HISTORY OF PATIENT NAVIGATION
  • WHY PATIENT NAVIGATION?
  • NAVIGATION THROUGHOUT THE CANCER CARE CONTINUUM
  • EXAMPLES OF NAVIGATION SUCCESS STORIES
  • WHO SHOULD RECEIVE NAVIGATION SERVICES?
  • WHO NAVIGATES?
  • EVIDENCE ON PATIENT NAVIGATION
  • EXAMPLES OF RESEARCH NEEDS
  • REAL-WORLD MODELS OF PATIENT NAVIGATION
  • LESSONS LEARNED
  • NAVIGATION RESOURCES
  • PATIENT NAVIGATION COMPETENCIES AND STANDARDS
  • PATIENT NAVIGATION TRAINING AND CERTIFICATION
  • EXAMPLES OF POLICY CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES
  • RECENT POLICY INITIATIVES IN PATIENT NAVIGATION
  • WORKSHOP WRAP-UP
  • REFERENCES
• Appendix A. Statement of Task
• Appendix B. Workshop Agenda

Rapporteurs: Sharyl J. Nass, Cyndi Trang, and Margie Patlak.

Suggested citation:

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2018. Establishing effective patient navigation programs in oncology: Proceedings of a workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.17226/25073.