Women's Health Unit, Section of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA.
Cancer. 2011 Aug;117(15 Suppl):3553-64. doi: 10.1002/cncr.26267.
The lack of comparable metrics to evaluate prevention and early detection patient navigation programs impeded the ability to identify best practices.
The Prevention and Early Detection Workgroup of the Patient Navigation Leadership Summit was charged with making recommendations for common clinical metrics specific to the prevention and early detection phase of the cancer care continuum. The workgroup began with a review of existing literature to characterize variability in published navigation metrics; then developed a list of priority recommendations that would be applicable to the range of navigation settings (clinical, academic, or community-based).
Recommendations for researchers and program evaluators included the following: 1) Clearly document key program characteristics; 2) Use a set of core data elements to form the basis of your reported metrics; and 3) Prioritize data collection using methods with the least amount of bias.
If navigation programs explicitly state the context of their evaluation and choose from among the common set of data elements, meaningful comparisons among existing programs should be feasible.
缺乏可比的指标来评估预防和早期发现患者导航计划，这阻碍了确定最佳实践的能力。
患者导航领导力峰会的预防和早期发现工作组负责提出针对癌症护理连续体预防和早期发现阶段的常见临床指标的建议。该工作组首先审查了现有文献，以描述已发表的导航指标的可变性；然后制定了一份优先建议清单，这些建议将适用于各种导航环境（临床、学术或社区）。
为研究人员和计划评估人员提出的建议包括以下内容：1）明确记录关键计划特征；2）使用一组核心数据元素作为报告指标的基础；3）使用最少偏见的方法优先收集数据。
如果导航计划明确说明其评估的背景，并从常见的数据元素集中进行选择，那么应该可以实现对现有计划进行有意义的比较。
