Enhancing Symptom Management and Coordination of Breast Cancer Care at Secondary Hospitals in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The passage highlights the complexity of integrated breast cancer care and the importance of effective communication in ensuring treatment compliance, reducing errors and complications, and managing co-morbidities. It emphasizes the need for clarity in the role of the care director to prevent patients from getting lost across different departments.

Digital tools are recognized as valuable resources for improving care communication, but their directives and integration within the care team need to be clearly defined. Multidisciplinary team meetings are essential for driving care planning, establishing directives, and collecting structured data. Nurse navigators play a pivotal role in ensuring care continuity and assuming the director's role in the complex landscape of breast cancer care. While AI-driven planning can facilitate their tasks, human intervention remains crucial for providing psychosocial support and addressing unexpected urgencies.

The allocation of patients across different healthcare centers is often managed manually and through phone communication, resulting in time-consuming processes and discontinuous system solutions. Privacy rules and competition among providers further limit the effectiveness of current solutions. Additionally, the collection of comprehensive outcome information is currently limited to specific collaborative networks.

To address these challenges, AI tools can play a role in facilitating care allocation and predicting risks by leveraging data continuity over time. This can help identify non-compliance issues caused by factors such as limited local resources, distance, and costs. However, it is essential to conduct applied research to bring AI modeling into clinical practice and promote well-coordinated, patient-centric cancer care within the complex healthcare landscape.