Inexpensive solutions to enhance remote cancer care in community hospitals

Abstract

Rapidly increasing volume and complexity of information used for multidisciplinary cancer treatment requires carefully evolving communications with programmatic planning, detailed evaluation, and new methodologies and technical approaches to enhance the impact and efficacy of medical conferencing systems. We designed, implemented, and evaluated cost-effective and appropriate remote learning optimize oncology practice techniques in community hospitals. Our experience over the course of more than 7 years demonstrated simple and inexpensive communication solutions for both professional and lay education, satisfying information-dense needs of multimodality cancer care. We describe how potential complexities may be resolved with inexpensive devices and software programs. Staff teamwork and creativity are always required to implement constantly evolving technologies. We provide both quantitative and qualitative data describing activities and resulting staff responses resulting in 6,520 personnel with more than 391 aggregate credit hours of continuing medical education and continuing education credit activities with enhanced collegial participant satisfaction levels and heightened interactions/professionalism among regional oncology staff. We noted significant cost reductions for communications in all our three partnered hospitals. We demonstrated both increased satisfaction levels and heightened levels of behavioral changes (Impacts) in participants. Always, activities must be cost effective and responsive to changing medical needs. Community focused efforts with regional partners should be similar, assuring evolving successes.