Bereavement Tracking Application
Pediatric Hematology/Oncology

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Project Background

While the primary focus of pediatric oncology is to attempt to cure each child diagnosed with cancer, inevitably in some cases the attempt fails and the patient dies. The surviving family members then face a difficult period of bereavement, where they must learn to come to terms with their loved one's death. The Bereavement Tracking application was developed by IRT at the request of Dr. Clare Twist, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (Hematology/Oncology) at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. The system faciliates the existing practice of following up with parents of deceased patients in order to offer them ongoing bereavement support.

The application consists of a data entry page to create a record of the patient, associated physicians and caregivers, a male and female parental figure, and any siblings. Other pages in the application permit locating a specific patient by name or a group of patients by their associated caregiver or the month of their death, in order to support sending out monthly letters of condolence on the anniversary of a patient's death. There is also the ability to manage annual bereavement ceremony dates and venues, and to keep track of which parents attended each ceremony.

In the interests of ensuring high quality data the application uses dropdown lists of choices wherever possible. For example, the providers and caregivers associated with a patient record must be chosen from a dropdown list. When a new provider joins the team, or when an existing provider moves on, these dropdown lists would become out of date but for the ability to edit the values in these lists as an integrated feature of the application.

The data is housed in IRT's fully HIPAA compliant secure data storage facility in an Oracle database with comprehensive relational integrity constraints as an additional guarantee of high data quality.