Cancer Care Delivery Research Committee

Cancer care delivery research (CCDR) is a multidisciplinary science that seeks to improve clinical outcomes and patient well-being by intervening on the patient, clinician, and organizational factors that influence care delivery. The ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group (ECOG-ACRIN) participates in a national CCDR research program sponsored by the National Cancer Institute through its NCI Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP).

CCDR studies by ECOG-ACRIN align with the NCI's main goal for this program: to generate evidence that can be used to improve clinical practice, particularly through the evaluation of pragmatic interventions that focus on clinicians, staff, and/or practices. For more information, visit the NCI website, NCORP / CCDR section.

Currently, there are three areas of emphasis for ECOG-ACRIN's cancer care delivery research:

1Team-based care

The committee seeks to create new team-based care interventions across community oncology practices. It assesses NCORP sites for their capacity to collaborate on this research, which aims to characterize system and practice barriers to team-based care delivery. In some cases, evidence-based interventions discovered in academic sites are being transitioned into the NCORP sites. For example, a successful academic program to help cancer patients stop smoking via virtual counseling is being tested for national implementation (EAQ171CD).

2 Financial burden

The committee is integrating a brief set of measures into ECOG-ACRIN trials--across types of cancer and treatments--to document factors that predict risk for developing financial burden. In medicine, this is the term used to describe problems a patient has related to the cost of medical care. Not having health insurance or having high costs for medical care not covered by health insurance can cause financial problems and may lead to debt and bankruptcy. Financial burden can also affect a patient’s quality of life and access to medical care. Cancer patients are more likely to have financial burden than people without cancer. Source: National Cancer Institute

3Health equity and special populations

The committee is collaborating with the Health Equity Committee on trials to improve care delivery to at-risk populations, and to assess practice- and system-level characteristics that may contribute to disparities.