Expanding Access to Innovative Cancer Treatments

Linda Bosserman, MD, PhD, FASCO, FACP, medical oncologist and professor at City of Hope, highlights the importance of implementing cutting-edge cancer treatments, which was a focus of the panel discussion "Bringing Academic Medicine and Optimal Cancer Care to the Community" during the Institute for Value-Based Medicine^® (IVBM) event held last week in Garden Grove, California.

She also summarizes what she hopes attendees took away from the event, particularly from the panel discussion and her presentation, "Challenges of Providing Therapeutic Excellence in Our Current System."

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Transcript

Can you summarize the main topics of the panel discussion you participated in?

Our panel discussion was exciting because we brought in experts who are giving the cutting-edge treatments and clinical trials. We talked about, how do you get that implemented? When you're at a Comprehensive Cancer Center, NCI [National Cancer Institute] designated or other, you have access to the best possible treatment for each patient. But how do we share that?

You have to make sure that, at the bedside, through electronic tools, tumor boards, conferencing, and our special complex case conferences, our international and national tumor boards and symposia, we can share that information with every physician who's treating patients, no matter where they are.

Our discussion was exciting because, through City of Hope, there is Epic [electronic health record], which is providing national expertise to all sites connected to us, and through Access Hope, which provides second opinions to patients and then works with their doctors, wherever they are in the US, to let them know they're providing the best care. When that care needs to be at a specialized center, making that seamless, making it a smooth navigation, and then returning that patient to the community and their physician for care once specialty care is provided.

Those are the things we got to talk about and show how City of Hope's tools, teams, and implementation processes are making that a reality not just for patients in our local area, but across the country and, through our international partnerships, across the world.

What did you hope attendees took away from the event, especially your presentation and discussion?

I hope that attendees can take away from our discussion, our panel, and my presentation that while there are barriers and challenges, there are organizations like City of Hope that have really stepped up to improve access and equity to diverse populations by ensuring that we can partner with doctors and patients wherever they're located, in our network or outside of our network, to bring the best cancer diagnostics, treatment, and care to patients.

We're interested in providing survival and care everywhere that we can impact with our knowledge and our science. We're interested in bringing clinical trials with state-of-the-art care to patients at every site in our network through connectivity and easy access to academic centers at Duarte and Irvine [City of Hope locations] for any patient who needs it.

That's the exciting way we're trying to approach overcoming the barriers, through technology, teams, processes, and partnering.