Kathleen Lokay on Educating Patients on Treatment Options

Kathleen Lokay, president and CEO of Via Oncology, encourages physicians to educate patients on clinical pathways and discusses how the patient voice is heard.

Transcript

Do you have patients involved in the pathways program process to include patient preferences?

Not so much in the sense that we don’t really have patient-facing tools, but what we do provide to our customers is patient education around the drugs to help the patients understand the risk versus benefits of the regiment. But the patient’s voice is really brought to the table through the physicians.

We don’t actually have patients on our committees and it’s not that we are opposed to that it’s just that the committees are very, very scientific. We have reached out and engaged many of the patient advocacy foundations to really try to have them be partners in understanding how we go about representing the patient voice. Ultimately, it’s up to the physician, and we would encourage physicians when talking to patients share the pathway with them, let them see why the pathway recommends this or that and even discuss with them maybe why that patient doesn’t fit the pathway and therefore, should be off pathway. That’s certainly something every physician should do anytime they are meeting with their patient and discussing treatment decisions.