The American Cancer Society (ACS), along with Color Health, has officially announced the expansion of a program, which is designed to help employers and labor unions support their employee and member populations across all stages of a cancer journey. Under the agreed terms, this expansion will see Color Health bringing its Color Medical clinical teams to manage any abnormal screening through confirmed diagnosis, specialized care for high-risk individuals, holistic support for employees in cancer treatment, and integrated clinical and mental health support for recovered survivors. Talk about the program on a slightly deeper level, though, it helps you provide support for five cancer-related elements among a workforce. For starters, we have the education and awareness bit, which leverages content curated by a team of cancer experts to improve engagement, increase evidence-based screening compliance, and identify future cancer risk. Next up, we must revisit the screening aspect, where the idea is to detect cancer as early as possible. Providing at-home distributed screenings and at-imaging networks, the program guides you on when and how often employees and members should be screened using ACS’ guidelines. Almost like an extension of that, the clinicians running the program are also expected to use their expertise to better manage a potential diagnosis through scheduling, logistics, and navigation. To make this diagnoses stage even more seamless, once the exact condition and degree of it is determined, Color will quickly connect you to quality affordable care and treatment, therefore saving time and money long associated with duplicative appointments and administrative backlog. Then, there is the core cancer treatment support that is conceived using integrations with Centers of Excellence. A major detail worth mentioning here would be how, even though only 20% of cancer patients are typically eligible for cancer support programs post-diagnosis, this new program ensures that all participating employees and members are eligible for Color’s services.
Anyway, Rounding up highlights is the approach towards survivorship, an approach which translates to the fact that employees in remission can also access a continued supply of quality care. Here, you get support for both physical and mental health, as well as assistance in managing the costs of continued care.
As a part of this program, Color Health is also running a first-of-its-kind Virtual Cancer Clinic, which offers an in-house clinical care team made up of practicing physician teams, a specialist oncologist network, high-risk clinical coordinators, and genetic counselors. Furthermore, it will conceive for patients an integrated brand of diagnostics, along with a nationwide imaging network. The former will allow swift, high-quality screening and follow-up diagnostic care, whereas the latter should provide appointment availability in less than two weeks, significantly faster than the national average. Complimenting the same is robust patient support, a feature revealing itself once you acknowledge the effort’s proprietary and evidence-based peer support program called Color Cancer Connect, which offers mental health support services, and care advocates for handling logistical needs. These needs can pertain to appointment scheduling and financial considerations of cancer prevention, detection, and care.
Coming back to ACS and Color’s joint program, its expansion becomes more important, if you look at the impact it has made already. So, the program has helped 84% patients increase their familiarity with the timing and frequency of cancer screening, while tripling guidelines-based screening adherence rates in the process. Beyond that, 89% patients even reported satisfaction with a Color clinician as “excellent” or “very good”.
