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Metrics to evaluate treatment summaries and survivorship care plans: A scorecard

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Abstract

Purpose

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) and Commission on Cancer have called for provision of treatment summaries (TSs) and survivorship care plans (SCPs) at the end of primary cancer therapy and endorsed guidelines for content. Institutions are providing TS/SCPs but with little guidance concerning concordance with IOM recommended content. This manuscript presents a recently developed tool to allow rating of breast cancer-specific TS/SCPs as a model for assessing concordance with IOM recommendations and facilitating research and clinical fidelity.

Method

An interdisciplinary team developed items mapped to the IOM recommendations for TS/SCP content as well as scoring rules. Dual raters used this tool to independently assess 65 completed TS/SCPs from 13 different cancer treatment facilities affiliated with the LIVESTRONG Survivorship Centers of Excellence to assess reliability.

Results

The final set of measures contained 92 items covering TSs and SCPs. The TS scale consisted of 13 informational domains across 60 items, while the SCP scale had 10 domains across 32 items. Inter-rater reliability within TSs indicated substantial agreement (M kappa = 0.76, CI = 0.73–0.79), and interclass correlation (ICC) was high (ICC = 0.85, CI = 0.76–0.91). For the SCP scale, inter-rater reliability was also substantial (M kappa = 0.66, CI = 0.62–0.70), as was interclass correlation (ICC = 0.75, CI = 0.62–0.84).

Conclusion

Concordance with IOM recommendations for TS/SCP information can be reliably assessed using this instrument, which should facilitate implementation efforts, allow comparison of different TS/SCPs, and facilitate research into the utility of TS/SCPs including which elements are essential.

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Acknowledgments

LIVESTRONG™ Foundation and National Institutes of Health Grant 1R21CA169950-01A1 are acknowledged.

Conflict of interest

The authors do not have a financial relationship with the organization that sponsored the research. The authors declare that they have full control of all primary data and agree to allow the journal to review these data if requested.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, 3400 Spruce St., 1103 Penn Tower, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Steven C. Palmer

  2. Abramson Cancer Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Linda A. Jacobs, Angela DeMichele & Carrie Tompkins Stricker

  3. University of Colorado Cancer Center, Aurora, CO, USA

    Betsy Risendal & Alison F. Jones

Authors
  1. Steven C. Palmer
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  2. Linda A. Jacobs
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  3. Angela DeMichele
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  4. Betsy Risendal
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  5. Alison F. Jones
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  6. Carrie Tompkins Stricker
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Steven C. Palmer.

Additional information

Stricker, C. T., Jacobs, L. A., et al. Survivorship care plan assessment checklist (SCPAC): a tool to evaluate breast cancer survivorship care plans. J Clin Oncol 29:2011 (suppl; abstr 6117), [Presented at the Annual ASCO meeting, Chicago, IL. June 2011.]

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Palmer, S.C., Jacobs, L.A., DeMichele, A. et al. Metrics to evaluate treatment summaries and survivorship care plans: A scorecard. Support Care Cancer 22, 1475–1483 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-013-2107-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-013-2107-x

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