Navigating the Health Care Maze

 Kimberly Higginbotham was in her last year of graduate school at Howard University when she found a lump in her breast. 

At the age of 23, she was told she had breast cancer. 

The Howard University Cancer Center

"When I was diagnosed, my mother was there with me," Higginbotham says. "While I had the tears, she had the ears."

Having another person there with her that day and in the rough days that followed was valuable she says.

In remission for 10 years now, Higginbotham has now become a person other newly diagnosed cancer patients can rely on and turn to for help, advice and support. 

She is the patient navigation coordinator for the Howard University Cancer Center at Howard University Hospital in northeast Washington, D.C. It is a role she held informally for several years, before the hospital created an official position in September.

As a patient navigator, Higginbotham offers her assistance to patients and their family members, helping them maneuver the morass of the health care system, while coordinating doctors' appointments and follow-up care. She has also helped patients find transportation to and from the hospital, as well as find a meal service. 

"When you're diagnosed with cancer and worried about your health, you don't need to be worrying about anything else," she says. 

The first patient navigation program was established in 1990 at Harlem Hospital Center by Dr. Harold P. Freeman, who came up with the idea as a way of improving patient's access to timely diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The navigator guides the patient through and around what can often be an overwhelming and confusing process.

"When you get that diagnosis, it's like having a ton of bricks hitting you," says Tasha Tilghman-Bryant, a project associate with C-Change Together, a consortium of the nation's key cancer leaders from the government, business and nonprofit sectors working together to eliminate cancer. 

C-Change, based in the District, offers a Cancer Patient Navigation Toolkit and promotes the concept of community-based patient navigation programs.

Left to right, patient navigators, Kimberly Higginbotham and Whitney O'Donnell discuss a patient undergoing cancer treatment with oncology clinical nurse, Linda Robinson at the Howard University Cancer Center at the Howard University Hospital.

"It's helpful to have these navigators who can direct you and say, 'You have the diagnosis, here's where you need to go from here,'" Tilghman-Bryant says. 

Whitney O'Donnell, another patient navigator at the Howard University Cancer Center, says it would have been helpful to have someone guiding her through her treatment for Hodgkin's Lymphoma. She went through six cycles of chemotherapy and has been in remission for four years. 

Having cancer survivors serve as navigators is priceless, says Alice Mahan, administrator for clinical oncology services at Howard Cancer Center. 

And the navigators say the work they do to help other cancer patients is rewarding.

"It's just nice to feel I can share my experience and be able to help someone else," says O'Donnell, who joined the Howard University Cancer Center in October.

Higginbotham, who was headed for a career in physical therapy before her breast cancer diagnosis, says she feels like she is more needed as a cancer patient navigator.

"Sometimes God directs us to different places and you don't know why until you get there," she says.