Cancer prevalence is rising and there has been a corresponding increase in cancer-related hospitalizations. Understanding how cancer patients are treated in hospital, their costs and outcomes is important to help improve both care and costs. To our knowledge, detailed study and comparison of hospitalization characteristics in the Canadian cancer patient population have not been conducted. This is a crucial gap given the prevalence and burden of hospitalizations among cancer patients.
Gathering data from admissions to oncology wards is required to obtain a complete picture of cancer inpatient care, and to facilitate a comparison of care, cost and resource utilization and outcomes of cancer patients admitted to oncology, versus general internal medicine (GIM) wards. This comparison will have important implications, as there are many different models for inpatient cancer care across Canada with no prior work to date to understand the implications of these differences on patient or system-level outcomes.
In the current study, we will leverage the previously developed infrastructure and expertise to extend GEMINI to include data for adult oncology inpatients (ONCO-GEMINI). The ONCO-GEMINI retrospective cohort study aims to help us better understand patterns of care for oncology inpatients, describe the quality, cost and outcomes of their inpatient care, and identify opportunities for further research and quality improvement.
This project will help to expand GEMINI to include cancer services in the GEMINI network and will serve as a demonstration project to support applications for additional funding for expansion to the larger GEMINI network as GEMINI expands out to other Ontario hospitals. This will allow us to capture inpatient cancer care information across the province. To our knowledge, this will be the first inpatient oncology data repository of its kind in Canada and one of few such examples globally.