Massachusetts general hospital: improving patient access to the breast oncology clinic

As part of Massachusetts General Hospital's overall quality improvement program, the Massachusetts General Hospital Breast Oncology Program participated in the NCCN Breast Cancer Outcomes Database Opportunities for Improvement Program. A review of concordance to breast oncology quality measures revealed that a small proportion of patients with breast cancer started chemotherapy more than 120 days after diagnosis. Therefore, the research team designed a quality improvement project to increase the percentage of concordance with the ASCO quality measure that requires time to treatment of less than 120 days and to decrease the number weeks from last definitive surgery to first adjuvant chemotherapy by 2014. A multipronged approach of improvements was used: to systems and infrastructure, communication among providers, and recruitment of additional staff as needed. This article describes the project and future initiatives to further improve the quality of breast cancer care at the institution.