Patient navigator programs seek to help cancer patients and providers address specific social barriers to care within a healthcare system and thus represent an important strategy to improve care, according to a new study. The study also notes that these programs have evolved to address local needs and barriers and have yet to be systematically defined or evaluated. The report appears in the August 15, 2005 issue of CANCER (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/cancer-newsroom), a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, and calls for new scientifically rigorous evaluations of these new programs to assess their impact.

Navigation programs were created by healthcare systems to address internal barriers that may contribute to well described inequities in cancer care that generally impact minorities, low-income communities, and recent immigrants in the United States. Since the first program was started in New York City in the 1990s, the concept has been adopted in other healthcare settings around the country. Recently, the federal government and national agencies have demonstrated interest in this model and committed millions of dollars in research monies to establish and evaluate navigation programs. Understanding how existing programs define and organize navigation services and the effectiveness of extant programs is important for future programs and research.

In this new study Daniel Dohan, Ph.D. of the University of California, San Francisco and Deborah Schrag, M.D., M.P.H. of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center reviewed the literature on navigation systems and described care processes in clinics with and without navigation programs. The authors found a dearth of research literature on navigation programs in general and noted that program efficacy had yet to be evaluated using rigorous methodologies such as randomization. Although there is no standard definition of a nav
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Contact: David Greenberg
dgreenbe@wiley.com
201-748-6484
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
11-Jul-2005

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