University of California Irvine Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center & Bristol Myers Squibb Foundation
University of California Irvine Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center
The University of California Irvine Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center (CFCCC) will build a formal collaborative network as a hub/spoke model between community organizations, CalOptima primary and specialty care providers, and UCI’s specialists to provide more efficient and effective cancer care for low income MediCal Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese patients in Orange County, California.
Need
Orange County, California is home to the third-largest population of Asian Americans with 10.4% of the state’s population. Many Asian Americans have lower per capita income, lower educational attainment, higher uninsured rates, and limited English proficiency. Prevention and early detection are generally lower among Asian Americans and there are significant barriers related to cancer access and care. Many individual and community factors contribute to later stage diagnosis and treatment including cultural stigma, beliefs, and lack of social support. Orange County lacks a single county-wide safety-net hospital for cancer-related secondary and tertiary care and there is often a disconnect between safety-net insurers and subspecialty-academic centers.
Project
The project goals are to decrease incidence and mortality from breast, cervical, colorectal, liver and stomach cancers among low income Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese patients in Orange County. Through this project, a formal network will be built between community organizations through community health navigators, CalOptima primary and specialty care providers, and UCI CFCCC to bridge the gap between research, education, and health systems operations to provide more effective and efficient cancer care. A clinical care network through UCI CFCCC will serve as a “hub” reaching to individual CalOptima primary care providers, CalOptima medical and surgical oncologists, and federally qualified health centers as the “spokes” will be created as an innovative model pathway to improve access to and utilization of cancer care.
Project Leaders
Sora Park Tanjasiri, tanjasir@uci.edu and Robert Bristow, rbristow@uci.edu