title: Moving survivorship care plans forward: focus on care coordination.
abstract: After completing treatment for cancer, the coordination of oncology and primary care presents a challenge for cancer survivors. Many survivors need continued oncology follow-up, and all survivors require primary care. Coordinating the shared care of a cancer survivor, or facilitating an informed handoff from oncology to primary care, is essential for cancer survivors. Survivorship care plans are personalized documents that summarize cancer treatment and outline a plan of recommended ongoing care, with the goal of facilitating the coordination of post-treatment care. Despite their face validity, five trials have failed to demonstrate the effectiveness of survivorship care plans. We posit that these existing trials have critical shortcomings and do not adequately address whether survivorship care plans improve care coordination. Moving forward, we propose four criteria for future trials of survivorship care plans: focusing on high-needs survivor populations, tailoring the survivorship care plan to the care setting, facilitating implementation of the survivorship care plan in clinical practice, and selecting appropriate trial outcomes to assess care coordination. When trials meet these criteria, we can finally assess whether survivorship care plans help cancer survivors receive optimal oncology and primary care.
authors.affiliation: Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York.
authors.forename: Talya
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Salz
authors.affiliation: Head and Neck Oncology Service, Department of Medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York.|Department of Medicine, Weil Medical College of Cornell University, New York, New York.
authors.forename: Shrujal
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-8411-0658
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Baxi
mesh_terms: D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D006301:Health Services Needs and Demand; D006801:Humans; D008495:Medical Oncology / Q000592:standards; D017063:Outcome Assessment, Health Care; D010347:Patient Care Planning / Q000592:standards; D011320:Primary Health Care / Q000592:standards; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D017741:Survivors
keywords: Cancer survivors; care coordination; clinical trials; health care quality; primary care