Clinician-to-Clinician Telemedical Consultation to Improve Rural Access to Gynecologic Cancer Care

Project summary

Many patients with gynecologic cancer are not able to receive high quality care because they live far from the specialists best able to treat them. When there is no easy way for rural doctors to send information for specialists to review, patients may be asked to travel for in-person visits. Long-distance travel is not possible for all patients, and can be expensive, uncomfortable, and add to the strain caregivers experience. As a result, rural patients have inequitable access to care, making them more likely to die from gynecologic cancers.

The purpose of this project is to develop and test a telemedicine program allowing rural doctors to communicate directly with specialist gynecologic oncologists and review patient information together. Through this program, some patients will be able to avoid travel for a visit that can be managed closer to home, rural doctors will be able to treat patients with specialists’ help, and relationships between specialists and rural doctors will be strengthened, improving access for geographically underserved patients with cancer.

We are committed to building this program for sustainability. As part of this project, we are using patients’, gynecologists’, oncologists’, and gynecologic oncologists’ input to guide workflow. Additionally, we will calculate the “value-on-investment” of this program, so that we can present the financial case to health systems for using clinician-to-clinician telemedicine to improve health equity for rural cancer patients.