Implementing risk-aligned bladder cancer surveillance care

Implementation science is a rapidly developing field dedicated to the scientific investigation of strategies to facilitate improvements in healthcare delivery. These strategies have been shown in several settings to lead to more complete and sustained change. In this essay, we discuss how refined surveillance recommendations for non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer, which involve a complex interplay between providers, healthcare facilities, and patients, could benefit from use of implementation strategies derived from the growing literature of implementation science. These surveillance recommendations are based on international consensus and indicate that the frequency of surveillance cystoscopy should be aligned with each patient′s risk for recurrence and progression of disease. Risk-aligned surveillance entails cystoscopy at 3 and 12 months followed by annual surveillance for low-risk cancers, with surveillance every 3 months reserved for high-risk cancers. However, risk-aligned care is not the norm. Implementing risk-aligned surveillance could curtail overuse among low-risk patients, while curbing underuse among high-risk patients. Despite clear direction from respected and readily available clinical guidelines, there are multiple challenges to implementing risk-aligned surveillance in a busy clinical setting. Here, we describe how implementation science methods can be systematically used to understand determinants of care and to develop strategies to improve care. We discuss how the tailored implementation for chronic diseases framework can facilitate systematic assessment and how intervention mapping can be used to develop implementation strategies to improve care. Taken together, these implementation science methods can help facilitate practice transformation to improve risk-aligned surveillance for bladder cancer.