RWJBarnabas experts discuss participation in Merck Alliance

Leaders from the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ) and the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Massey Cancer Center recently met to discuss CINJ's progress as part of Merck's Alliance for Equity in Cancer Care.

Last year, CINJ became 1 of 8 major institutes to join the alliance, according to a press release. The Daily Targum spoke with two leaders of the implementation of this alliance to discuss their involvement with the program and its development.

Portia Lagmay-Fuentes, vice president of Integration and Implementation of Oncology Services at Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health (RWJBarnabas), said the alliance is dedicated to increasing the access marginalized communities have to oncology care, a long-standing disparity that was highlighted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While applying to the alliance, Lagmay-Fuentes said RWJBarnabas was able to leverage their network of hospitals certified under the 340B Drug Pricing program, a federal program that requires certain pharmaceutical companies to provide certified medical institutes, typically those that assist underserved communities, with medications at reduced rates.

The alliance has granted RWJBarnabas $2 million to be equally divided over a period of five years, she said. To assist with appropriately managing these funds, RWJBarnabas hired cultural navigators to serve as a bridge between the program and the communities it seeks to serve.

These cultural navigators will facilitate an expansion of how RWJBarnabas combats social determinants of health beyond cancer care, Lagmay-Fuentes said. Currently, the navigators address barriers associated with transportation, food insecurity and preventative care.

They do so by transporting patients to and from medical facilities, assisting them when registering for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, providing them with resources to purchase food within the same day they request assistance and providing medical screenings.

Navigators are also encouraged to pursue language training, often in Spanish, to better assist individuals, Lagmay-Fuentes said. Being certified to interpret languages is a requirement of RWJBarnabas employees. 

"We support — actually, we encourage all the navigators … to go through a certification for interpretation," she said. "Those are things to improve our staff, our resources, to better connect and communicate with the patients, the community and the providers."

With this grant, Lagmay-Fuentes said RWJBarnabas hopes to improve four major areas of operation: care coordination for patients, patient engagement and satisfaction, relationships with community partners and public awareness of these services.

Jeanne Silva, lead program investigator for the Merck Alliance in the Department of Oncology at RWJBarnabas, further explained that other goals of this alliance include decreasing the impact of the barriers patients face and focusing on patient-centered communication.

"Nobody is ever excited or happy to deal with cancer," Silva said. "But how could we improve the services and the support that we give them to make it the best experience that we could?"

With specific regard to barriers, Silva said underserved communities may be challenged by tasks such as scheduling appointments, traveling to them and applying for financial aid. These concerns differ from those that afflict patients who have insurance coverage and can more easily access health care resources.

Patients without these resources often seek out immediate care from emergency departments but do little to properly maintain care, Silva said. Being able to do so in a timely manner, though, can increase the likelihood of cancer recovery and survival. 

She said an RWJBarnabas initiative has been established to achieve these goals by creating a community advisory board, which would allow community members who have experienced such barriers to contribute to forming solutions.

"We're a very large system spanning across the state of New Jersey," Silva said. "So, how do we meld the Southern region with the Northern region? Look at the same resources, or if the Northern region had resources and the Southern didn't, how could we spread them across our service line to try to better patient care?"