Making Cancer Care Easier With Community Bispecific Antibody Programs

Caring for patients with cancer in the community makes for an easier cancer journey. When they have to travel to another city or stay in a hotel away from home to get a novel therapy like a bispecific antibody, that makes everything harder, explained Courtney VanHouzen, PharmD, PGY-2 oncology resident, Cowell Family Cancer Center, Munson Healthcare.

Her cancer center in northern Michigan is providing patients the chance to stay at home, with their local support systems, which means people are getting access to treatment that they might have otherwise passed on for a later-line therapy.

This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.

Transcript

Who are the patients you can reach with a community bispecific delivery program who might otherwise not have access to this therapy?

For us, we're located in northern Michigan. We serve a very large rural community in northern Michigan. We tend to cover the top third of this day as well as most of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. For a lot of these patients, certainly, there's a good amount of social disparities. For an oncologist in northern Michigan to refer one of these patients down to University of Michigan, Mayo Clinic, or one of these other institutions, logistically, it's just not possible for a lot of our patients to make this happen, whether that is due to finances or just the lack of social support.

When you're talking about patient populations that are eligible to receive bispecific therapies in hematologic malignancies, they tend to be older, so, they really need to have a support system around them to get them through these therapies and initiations. We have a large eligibility population who, I think, otherwise would forgo this treatment at another facility due to all of those reasons I listed. That was really our motivating factor to establish this in a community center, because we don't want these patients to either be choosing later-line therapy just to avoid “the hassle” of going to another facility for ramp up or forgoing treatment in general. We were able to try to create this opportunity for them in their own communities.

It's not easy to (A) get the finances, but (B) some centers, if you don't have a caregiver who lives with you or can show you have the social support, they’ll, ironically, decline you. We really want to partner with our patients in the community and show them that not only do we support you by being able to do this in our community but also keep you closest to your families and your friends who are going to be the ones that really get you through the whole cancer diagnosis, treatment, etc.

A cancer diagnosis is overwhelming enough. But then to go on to say, “We're going to refer you to a new city, to a new provider, to a new team,” and you have all of this anxiety with all of that newness, and that's disregarding the financial toxicity of that situation. So, being able to keep these patients in the community is huge, and even our first few patients who we were able to ramp up and keep in northern Michigan, they were so grateful. Some of them had to be admitted, some didn't, but regardless, they're neighbors were there and they're churches or local schools who were able to fundraise and rally around them. It's a beautiful thing to be able to care for the community in the community.

I think, giving this program the ability to grow in northern Michigan has been huge and our patients are extremely grateful to be able to not have to travel, to not have to stay in hotels, to not have to buy fast food instead of getting casseroles delivered to them at their front door. All of these things are huge for the journey that is going through cancer. And so, we're extremely grateful that we're able to do this and offer that for our families.