Kirsten Eom wants to know everything there is to know about how cancer survivors access health care. “So, getting to appointments. Understanding what the doctor's saying. Understanding, [when you go] home, what [you're] supposed to do in between the appointments. All that is, to me, access to care.”
Eom is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Health Services Administration at the Kate Marmion School of Public Health at UT San Antonio, and has a PhD in Health Services Research and Policy, which she says is all the things that go into getting you from your home to seeing a doctor. “We study access to care, quality of care, and cost of care,” Eom explained.
Her current focus is on cancer survivors, because, she says, a surprising number of them don’t get any care at all after their initial treatment ends. Her goal is to figure out what’s keeping them away from the doctor’s office, and to fix it.
"If it's a health insurance thing, we help them try to get it. If it's transportation, we try to transport the patients,” Eom said. “So what I'm building is a new delivery model that connects between the system and the community.”
Eom calls the new system she envisions "whole person care," in which the health care system considers all aspects of a person’s life when creating their care plans. "Not just the diseases and their functional status; it's a person. We care about their family, their work."
Health services research involves gathering a lot of data and parsing the numbers, and Eom spends a lot of her time gathering data about cancer survivors and their experiences with health care. “My work is finding out new gaps. And then I go out, try to fix or try to fill those gaps, and then add more data points so that it helps other people.”
To better detect those gaps in care, Eom aims to build a Texas cancer survivors' registry that tracks the financial, geographic, and policy barriers that can disrupt equitable, continuous follow-up care. In her vision, it would be similar to the Texas Cancer Registry, a statewide database run by the Texas Department of State Health Services that tracks every single new case of cancer diagnosed or treated within the state.
"I don't see why we can't replicate that for survivors," Eom said. "So that's something that I'm very passionate about."
