Ask what it means to change a treatment plan, and most people picture switching a drug, adjusting a dose, choosing surgery over radiation. By that definition, WorldCare’s multidisciplinary medical case reviews change 3 in 4 of them, a number we’ve used for years to explain the value of access to the worlds’ best medical guidance.
But that number hides the complexity of the insights patients and their attending physicians receive from The WorldCare Consortium’s multidisciplinary teams.
Members come to WorldCare because we specialize in serious, complex conditions like advanced cancers, rare diseases, neurological disorders — cases where the right path forward usually isn’t a straight line. Gold-standard care pathway guidance from medical societies is just one part of the complexity involved in mapping an individual medical journey. WorldCare Consortium teams build what a generic pathway isn’t designed to produce: a route planned around one person using that patient‘s own goals, wishes, and medical history, incorporating the latest medical innovation from top academic medical centers.
It’s a full journey mapped out in advance, plus plans for pivots at specific trigger points, like the way a GPS builds a destination map that recalculates the instant the weather shifts or a road closes. In our multidisciplinary team-based “mapmaking,” four to seven specialists (e.g. oncologists, surgeons, radiologists, pathologists, and geneticists and others) consult on a typical case and provide a comprehensive consensus report.
11 components that factor into every WorldCare Treatment Plan
- Diagnostic basis: the starting point, reconfirmed, refined or revised by WorldCare Consortium physicians, including re-review of all pathologies and lab results. This includes both what‘s actually being treated and how confident the diagnosis is.
- Treatment goal: the destination, set together with the patient based on intakes with our nurse and medical director case managers. We also lay out what triggers or clinical responses might change that goal to or from disease curing, control, or palliative care.
- Additional testing: recommendations on extra information, including any genetic, pharmacogenomic or biomarker panels, that can inform decisions on the optimal path and reveal underlying conditions.
- Lines of defense and sequencing: the planned route, plus the alternate roads already mapped before they’re needed. We also include the order of these defense lines — first-line, second-line, third-line — and the trigger conditions that move a patient from one to the next.
- Specific interventions: these are the actual levers, or “turn-by-turn directions,” like which medications to start, change, or discontinue, as well as surgery and radiation procedures. Since WorldCare Consortium specialist teams are neutral patient advocates, they advise on interventions independent of drug formularies, provider economics or other influencers.
- Monitoring plan: these include checkpoints that confirm the route is still working, including which labs, which imaging, at what interval, and what marker defines success or failure.
- Contingency criteria: the rerouting instructions, or “if this, then that ” logic. Any plan that describes only the immediate next step, with no branching logic for failure or progression, is incomplete.
- Supportive care: Once again, this support is often rooted in concerns or desires expressed by the patient to our case managers. Specific guidance might include local support groups, reading lists, suggestions to pursue counseling or guidance for managing family dynamics.
- Care coordination: suggestions of other specialists to bring in when the situation calls for it, like specialists, genetic counselors, or hereditary-risk teams.
- Patient-specific modifiers: the patient’s own history, comorbidities, preferences, and willingness or refusal to engage in particular approaches must all be accounted for rather than ignored. Doing so drives patient empowerment and self-advocacy to optimize adherence and outcomes.
- Timeline: the horizon, plus the scheduled stops to re-check the whole plan — not just check a single metric.
Every single WorldCare multidisciplinary review adjusts an aspect of the treatment plan, or accounts for a plan variable in a new way.
It’s not just 3 in 4 treatment plans we revise. It’s all of them.