Long-Term Survivor Program

Passport for Care^®

The Passport for Care® application is an innovative healthcare initiative headed by faculty members of Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Cancer Center that addresses the need to provide survivors of childhood cancer with increased access to their medical information and healthcare guidelines. It is an interactive Internet resource that provides the user with accurate, timely, and individualized healthcare information on a “just-in-time” basis.

The Passport for Care® application for survivors of childhood cancer was developed to address the healthcare information needs of the estimated 500,000 long-term survivors in the United States; one in every 750 young adults is a survivor of childhood cancer. 

The Institute of Medicine and the President’s Cancer Panel have identified the provision of comprehensive follow-up medical care to long-term survivors of cancer as a critical national priority. Child and young adult survivors are often at risk for serious medical problems that result from cancer and its treatment. Obtaining consistent medical follow-up is confounded by several factors:

• Americans change primary healthcare providers on an average of every two years. 
• Survivors themselves are often unfamiliar with the details of their treatment history and are unable to accurately share pertinent medical information with their healthcare providers. 
• Primary care providers, in turn, are often unfamiliar with cancer treatments or with recommendations regarding surveillance for long-term complications of cancer and cancer therapy. 

In the current healthcare environment, obtaining consistent follow-up for the survivor population is extremely difficult and has been identified both by the Institute of Medicine and the President’s Cancer Panel as a major challenge to our healthcare system.