About Us
The Illinois Cancer Collaborative (ILCC) is a first-of-its-kind, multidisciplinary cancer care QI collaborative, open to all Commission on Cancer-accredited cancer programs in the state of Illinois (approximately 54 hospitals statewide).
We engage providers and institutions via statewide cancer QI projects to improve adherence to well-accepted cancer care guidelines, reduce variation in cancer care statewide, and improve outcomes. The ILCC Coordinating Center provides tailored support and resources to local cancer QI teams at member institutions to address the difficulties that sites have in understanding and effectively improving processes to provide best-practice cancer care. We have experience facilitating this multifaceted collaborative model and have proven its effectiveness in improving the quality of surgical care through the Illinois Surgical Quality Improvement Collaborative (ISQIC) which is also coordinated through Northwestern University.
Our History
First established in 2020, ILCC was created to bring large-scale QI to cancer care by supporting hospitals to effectively use hospital-level data and leveraging the experience and lessons learned from other hospitals related to same challenge.
Our network of teams at hospitals across Illinois participate in collaborative quality improvement projects to improve cancer care for all patients across the state. These include large-scale data collection projects which involve utilizing existing site-level cancer registry data. Additionally, member hospitals can abstract project-specific data that cannot be automated to an established ILCC electronic case report form database.
The Director of ILCC, Dr. Nisha Mohindra, is a board-certified medical oncologist at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University. Her research interests focus on the clinical investigation of novel agents or combination therapies for non-small cell and small cell lung cancer. She remains passionate about developing quality of life and economic research as it relates to immunotherapy and lung cancer through our work at ILCC.
Mission
Our Mission is to measure and improve the quality of cancer care across the state of Illinois and to demonstrate the effectiveness of collaboration among oncology clinicians and staff, hospitals, payers, organizations, and other stakeholders on statewide cancer care, with the expectation of improved adherence to cancer guidelines that will improve overall patient outcomes.
Vision
Our Vision is to support CoC-accredited hospitals in fulfilling CoC standards for accreditation through participation in collaborative-wide cancer quality improvement (QI) projects.
Additionally, we aim to provide novel strategies and resources to support effective cancer care locally, including guided implementation and mentoring through QI projects, Illinois-specific comparative data augmenting the NCDB, cancer-specific QI resources and education, and statewide sharing of best practices.
Our Projects
Clinical Resources
ILCC would not be possible without the support and cooperation of our partners, Astra Zeneca, National Cancer Database, ACS Commission on Cancer, and Northwestern Quality Improvement, Research & Education in Surgery.