Development and Analysis of a Treatment Timeliness Dashboard for Patients With Head and Neck Cancer at a Tertiary Academic Multidisciplinary Clinic

Improving timeliness represents a critical opportunity to maximize patient experience, quality of care, and overall health of a co-located multidis­ciplinary cancer (MDC) program. The primary objective was to develop a timeli­ness dashboard using a primary nursing care coordination model to track met­rics selected for care efficiency. The secondary objective was to identify whether timeliness improved with implementation of an MDC clinic with expanded visi­bility to care coordination. A nursing care coordination model was developed to perform data collection alongside frontline patient care to track patients’ jour­ney with cancer. A spreadsheet was first used but then transitioned to a web-based database based on nursing feedback. Timeliness metrics were collected from May 2019 through April 2023 with descriptive analysis performed to iden­tify trends. Results signify implementation of a co-located MDC with primary nursing care coordination has improved timeliness. The project showcases the importance of nursing care coordination in a high-volume clinic with increased visibility to patients’ journeys with cancer. It also demonstrates establishing and updating standardized work procedures for data collection, cleaning, and analy­sis for quality of care monitoring.