Addressing health disparities in childhood cancer survivorship care
Mentor Name: Lisa Schwartz
In March 2021, a technical brief was published--Disparities and Barriers to Pediatric Cancer Care--that was sponsored by the National Cancer Institute and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The report described research on disparities in survivorship care, healthcare utilization, and health outcomes, and articulated future research directions. In response, we sought and received funding to better understand multi-level barriers to engaging in survivorship care for adolescent and young adult survivors of childhood cancer. We also received funding to develop and test an intervention to re-engage survivors lost to follow-up. This project entails 1) conducting a literature search on disparities in survivorship care and strategies to engage hard-to-reach adolescent populations, 2) creating a database for data collection for the next phase of the pilot work, 3) data quality checking in the Redcap electronic data capture database, 4) conducting electronic health record reviews to gather relevant patient history and information on engagement in care (e.g., follow-up visits), and 5) summarizing results for presentation.
