How Navigating Cancer is Humanizing the Healthcare Industry

It’s no secret that the healthcare industry has been struggling with dehumanizing its patients for a while now. While the tools available to medical professionals have often improved results, the average quality of patient care has taken a step in the opposite direction. A variety of factors have contributed to this regression. There are many ways that healthcare professionals and services alike can turn this trend around. Navigating Cancer is a digital platform that is blazing a new trail when it comes to humanizing healthcare.

Healthcare has always been a highly professional field. Factors like patient-doctor confidentiality, bedside manner, and even sanitation all factor into the medical profession.

Nevertheless, over time there has been a distinct – and unwelcome – a paradigm shift. Patients have been hustled through medical experiences at an ever-increasing speed. Even when they have the ear of their doctor or another practitioner, the quality of the care they receive is often dehumanized. In many ways, the entire focus has shifted from the patient to the illnesses, ailments, and symptoms that they’re seeking to address.

There are a variety of factors driving this change. The intense demands of evolving technology can be distracting. Procedures trump individual situations. Institutional power continues to have a growing influence on medical activities. Even minutiae such as basic administrative duties leave medical professionals and patients alike jumping through an endless string of mundane, impersonal requirements.

The problem isn’t just one that impacts patients, either. In fact, often it’s the healthcare professionals themselves that are the first to recognize and demand the need for change.

The change in question must revolve around the people involved. Healthcare professionals, patients, their families, and even the larger community should all return to the forefront. This can take place in a variety of ways. For instance, healthcare professionals can strive to humanize each encounter by:

• Detaching from a future-oriented focus and zeroing in on the present;
• Being intentional with each patient, encounter, and interaction;
• Physically sitting and speaking on the level of their patients rather than talking down to them;
• Spending time setting a comfortable, welcoming tone to enhance (and by extension speed up) each encounter;
• Practicing active listening and reflecting the feelings, thoughts, and emotions of their patients;
• Being holistic about their care by helping to address tangential issues, such as financial concerns related to patient care.

This patient-focused emphasis should extend beyond individual, in-person interactions, as well. The increasing number of platforms that patients use to manage their healthcare activities must also wake up to the need for humanization.

Navigating Cancer is managing to do just that. The patient-centered oncology platform is attempting to rewrite the script when it comes to meaningful, caring patient interactions.

With cancer, you can’t ignore humanity. Patients are often faced with many life or death decisions. It’s a field where it’s difficult to walk the line between professionalism and humanization. This is where Navigating Cancer is making a difference. The digital solution enterprise has remained at the forefront of remote person-to-person care through a variety of patient-centric digital services.

For instance, personalized remote monitoring keeps patients on the radar of their healthcare providers even when they aren’t at an appointment. Value-based care goals also keep this humanized focus by utilizing provider reporting and documentation requirements. Navigating Cancer allows patients to manage their care at the tip of their fingertips, with their personalized patient portal, Navigating Care. The portal includes education, support networks, access to staff, and updated health records 24/7.

These digital solutions are tailored to improve the lives of the cancer patients that use the service. It also brings thousands of oncology care providers and dozens of pharmaceutical manufacturers and payer models together into a single digital space.

Over the years, Navigating Cancer has steadily refused to devolve into little more than an analytics platform or a communication tool. The ease of access and user-friendly nature of the platform ensures that people remain at the heart of everything that the humanizing digital platform does.

It’s an investment that is paying off as a growing number of providers and patients alike awake to the fact that they can, indeed, receive quality attention and care, even in the midst of a challenging diagnosis. As Navigating Cancer continues to blaze the humanization trail, the question that remains is if and when other platforms and practitioners will begin to follow suit.

CONTACT:
Lena Shaw
lshaw@navigatingcancer.com

SOURCE: Navigating Cancer