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Rapid relief from diagnostic delay: Tips, challenges, and 6-month outcomes of the UCHealth CARE diagnostic clinic.

Year: 2025
Type: conference-abstract
Abstract: 368 Background: The University of Colorado Cancer Center (UCHealth) has experienced significant growth in the number of new cancer diagnoses, resulting in a greater demand for prompt and reliable follow-up for these patients. The need for timely diagnostic workup places a greater burden on outpatient/emergency services, often leading to delayed or missed cancer diagnoses. To help offset the workload on primary providers that is inherent in the workup of a new cancer diagnosis, UCHealth has implemented the UCHealth CARE Diagnostic Clinic. Started in November 2024, this multidisciplinary, centralized clinic sees patients referred from both UCH and outside primary care providers, as well as ED patients who present with findings concerning for a new malignancy. Here we present the 6-month results of this newly launched CARE Diagnostic Clinic. Methods: The UCHealth CARE Diagnostic Clinic launched November 4, 2024. The clinic and referral system is available to all University of Colorado hospitals and clinics. A diagnostic team consisting of two APPs, a nurse navigator, program manager, and nursing support collectively triages referrals, provides navigation for financial services, and sees the patient through the entire diagnostic workup—labs, symptom management, imaging, and biopsies—and ultimately schedules the patient with the appropriate subspecialty oncology clinic. Clinic data were collected and managed using REDCap electronic data capture tools hosted at the University of Colorado. Results: The UCHealth CARE Diagnostic Clinic received 145 referrals between 11/4/2024 and 5/5/2025. 30.3% of these referrals came from ED (n = 44), 23.4% from PCP (n = 34), and 16.6% from inpatient (n = 24). Of these, 55.2% (n = 80) were deferred and 44.8% (n = 65) were directly triaged by the Diagnostic team. Of the 44 patients who were ultimately seen in the CARE Diagnostic Clinic, 50% were male (n = 22) and 50% were female (n = 22). 15.9% (n = 7) reported a preferred language other than English, and 27.3% identified as Hispanic (n = 12). Financial assistance/navigation was coordinated for 6.9% of patients (n = 10). On average, new cancer diagnostic referrals were seen in their respective subspecialty oncology clinic 21.1 days from their date of referral. Conclusions: The UCHealth Cancer Diagnostic clinic has demonstrated reliable and expeditious diagnostic care. Pre-launch data remains challenging to obtain, and the actualized cost savings have yet to be determined. The clinic continues to build on its early successes with increasing patient volumes and implementing continuous process improvements. Average time from cancer diagnostic referral to diagnostic step (in days). 1 st outreach (n=145) 1 st diagnostic clinic visit (n=44) IR biopsy (n=14) Diagnostic colonoscopy (n=4) EGD/EUS (n=8) Surgical biopsy (n=3) Subspecialty Oncology visit (n=44) Days from referral to event 0.95 7.4 9.5 9 10.8 39.3 21.1 days
DOI: 10.1200/op.2025.21.10_suppl.368
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4414893491
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