Assistant Professor/Post-doc Oncology Care

The Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences (BMS), Department of Technology, Policy and Society, Health Technology and Services Research (HTSR) section, is seeking an Assistant Professor in the area of Quality Assurance.

The Challenge

Patients living with or after cancer demand for multidisciplinary care. Many care providers and institutions are directly or indirectly involved in the chain of care activities for an individual patient. The (on average increasingly older) patient is becoming more and more outstanding due to factors such as the combination with underlying diseases or specific tumor characteristics (i.e. gene expression profiles). As a result, care is becoming increasingly sophisticated and personalized.

Innovations to improve the quality and efficiency of this care, i.e. in the operation management, diagnostics or treatment, results in simpler or more complex care. Organizational innovations include initiatives such as the formation of clinical cancer networks (CCN), whereby regional agreements are made regarding the concentration of treatment of specific patient groups. Also is the reallocation of care from within to outside the hospital in the future will be a challenge. Clinical innovations in diagnostics and treatment could include a new diagnostic imaging technique or a new drug. The degree of implementation and efficiency of these innovations is motivated by various factors. In daily care practice, treatment options are tailored to the patient and tumor characteristics and the options are discussed with the patient. The patient can make the choice not to be treated according to the guideline. In addition, the resources and expertise that make sophisticated care or innovations possible are not available everywhere. Also, an innovation is often developed in a controlled setting and the effect of an innovation in daily practice is not always known in advance. Thus, monitoring variation in implementation of innovations and assessment of the effect on quality of care and outcome in daily practice is crucial to increase the quality of care.

Using structured data and valid and reliable indicators, insight can be gained into the causes of variation in chain care and its consequences. Does the variation affect the outcome? Causes can lie in the organization of the care (market), financial regulations, management, medical policy, processes and procedures, human relationships, patient information, shared decision-making, etc.

Guiding within this position strives to instill in students the context and challenges of daily practice and to work with them to devise solutions. Research strives to resolve effect of implementation of clinical content, organizational and technological innovations on the quality and outcome of oncology care (outcomes research). Is there variation in care? What does insight into the quality of care provide? What factors influence variation (e.g., patient age, decision making in the consultation room/information to the patient, patient choice, lack of evidence of superiority of one treatment over another, practitioner preference, type of hospital/regional arrangements)? Does this variation influence the outcome (e.g., return of disease, complications, survival, quality of life, and patient satisfaction/happiness)? Which (implementation) interventions are effective to improve care?

The University of Twente strives to achieve these goals in close collaboration with the Netherlands Comprehensive Cancer Organisation (IKNL; www.iknl.nl). The IKNL hosts the Netherlands Cancer Registry (NKR) and has information on all patients with cancer in the Netherlands. IKNL wants to "let data live" and collaborates with other organizations and data sources such as DHD (Dutch hospital data), NIVEL first line registry, PHARMO, Profiles registry, allowing for data-driven research on variation, quality and outcomes of care.

The position

You contribute to research, teaching, and knowledge valorisation. You will

• (co-) teach courses in our bachelor and/or masters programs epidemiology;
• Perform analyses and write articles about the care for patients with (metastasized) cancer and use available data and analyze real world databases;
• Carry out research based on statistical analyses with data files;
• Contribute towards the supervision of PHD- candidates and guide students;
• Work closely in the team of scientists at the university that collaborates with hospitals and other healthcare organizations and work closely with, and are part of, the (breast cancer) research team of the Netherlands Comprehensive Cancer Organisation (IKNL).