PATHFINDER: Accelerating the lung cancer patient pathway

The UK have some of the lowest global survival rates for lung cancer. Early diagnosis is critical for patients to be able to access life-saving, innovative products and improve outcomes, but NHS workers do not have capacity to address this challenge on a systematic scale.

The goal was therefore to ensure that patients get access to the right treatment at the right time to ultimately eliminate lung cancer as a cause of death in the UK.

PATHFINDER was a collaborative initiative between six NHS Trusts, AstraZeneca and IQVIA aiming to support the NHS in understanding current patient pathways and implementing changes to facilitate earlier diagnosis of lung cancer.

• Analysis of quantitative and qualitative data, to identity pain points in patient pathways
• Deep dive assessments in centres to identify local needs and develop action plans
• Implementation of key recommendations to streamline pathways

Results

• Measurable optimitsation of care pathways for lung cancer within pilot centres
• Patient review times were reduced from 5 days to less than 24 hours
• PET CT scan wait times were reduced from 5-7 days to 2 days
• Improved sample collection and delivery with 80% reaching the lab on the same day

Many of the challenges seen in the six sites were not unique and will be common challenges for the NHS, so these solutions could work in other centres too. New centres who join PATHFINDER are also able to access anonymised recommendations, categorised into steps in the pathway, to leverage those that are most applicable to them.

Efforts to scale the results of PATHFINDER have already begun. PATHFINDER was presented at Oncology Professional Care, the NHS Confed Expo and the UK Oncology Forum in June where questions came from oncologists outside of lung cancer, offering an opportunity to share learning across other cancer areas.

Updates have also been made to Getting It Right First Time [GIRFT] – a national improvement programme in England – where a change to the Mult Disciplinary Team ways of working has been included as part of the best practice library.

The IQVIA MAPA offering: Bridging the gap between the NHS and life sciences industry

The IQVIA MAPA team delivers evidence-led, end-to-end services to ensure patients in the UK get efficient access to pharmaceutical therapeutics and diagnostics:

-          Seamless integration within the NHS, providing opportunities for knowledge-sharing and upskilling

-          A skilled workforce able to augment NHS capacity to deliver care

-          Ability to develop evidence-based risk stratification criteria to identify patient cohorts for care optimisation