SBIR PHASE I TOPIC 406: MHEALTH TO UTILIZE CANCER SURVIVORSHIP NAVIGATION FOR BENEFIT (HUB)

For over a decade, best practice guidelines have recommended that cancer survivors receive survivorship care, which includes surveillance for recurrence or new malignancies and for chronic physical or psychosocial effects from cancer and its treatment. While survivorship care may exist in academic centers, an implementation gap remains to provide this care seamlessly to survivors regardless of cancer type and providers. Patient navigators can address this gap. However, the absence of integrated approaches to reduce the cognitive and time burden of navigation-related tasks has significantly strained the capacity of these resources, who traditionally have not been focused on survivorship. Our goal is to develop and evaluate a patient navigation platform focusing on facilitating navigation tasks in the later stages of the cancer care continuum, creating an integrated survivorship care plan and enabling communication, care coordination and education. Special emphasis is put on integration into existing workflows and IT infrastructure. The proposed approach is particularly adapted, given its mobile infrastructure, to address the needs of survivors in both urban and rural communities including those where access to cancer treatment and follow-up may be challenging, leading to inferior outcomes. The proposed intervention has therefore the potential to improve survivorship care and reduce disparities.