Uniting to Support Patients With Cancer Beyond Treatment

In this discussion with The American Journal of Managed Care^® following our Institute for Value-Based Medicine^® event cohosted by NYU Langone Health, Kasey Bond, MPH, executive director of administration, Perlmutter Cancer Center, speaks to why it’s vital to keep patients at the center of all strategic partnerships between academic institutions and community-based oncology practices.

Bond oversees Perlmutter’s strategic planning and the operations across the NYU Langone Health network, which includes Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island.

This transcript has been lightly edited.

Transcript

What are your key takeaways regarding the roles of academic institutions and community-based practices in improving care for patients with cancer?

What I liked so much about it is that all 3 of the presentations touched on a different aspect of those partnerships.

I think Dr Mullangi’s [Samyukta Mullangi, MD, MBA, medical director, Thyme Care] presentation really highlighted the importance of our academic institutions and our community-based practices partnering together on policy reform and really being able to advocate for things that improve the care of our cancer patients, improve the lives of our cancer patients. My takeaway from that was really that there's power in numbers and that all of us have a responsibility to do right by the patient. I think that same theme was carried through the other discussions from Dr Roy [Brita Roy, MD, MPH, MHS, NYU Grossman School of Medicine] and Dr Lacouture [Mario Lacouture, MD, NYU Langone Health].

Dr Lacouture, I've had the pleasure of working with quite a bit, and with Dr Roy as well. And they sort of came at it from 2 different angles. Dr Lacouture was talking about the need to use specialists across all of our communities to help treat the symptoms for our cancer patients. I think a lot of people think about cancer treatment only as the patient getting chemo or the patient getting radiation or the patient having surgery. But the importance of his talk was to say that there are lots of other things associated with those treatments that are affecting these patients, and it's really important that we partner with those providers in the community and those that are part of some of our larger systems to provide that support to the patients close to where they live.

It can already be a lot for them to have to travel into the city or out to Long Island or to South Brooklyn for some kind of treatment, and being able to say, “Oh, I have this rash from my chemotherapy. I need to go see a dermatologist,” and these partnerships are allowing us to provide those services as close as possible to where the patient lives.

And then I think Dr Roy was coming at it from the perspective of being able to offer services to patients using community-based organizations [CBOs] and how important it is for our academic systems and our community-based practices to work with these CBOs to provide services that undoubtedly affect the patient's health outcomes, but are not services that our institutions might have the ability to provide—so things like supporting patients that have housing insecurity, or helping to provide food to those who might have food insecurity, or dealing with transportation or childcare issues.

I think the takeaway from all 3 of these discussions is that no one entity in any of these areas is able to do everything for everyone, and we really need to come together and identify what each of our strengths is, and then make sure that we're leaning on each other to support the patient for things that might not be in our wheelhouse.

The patient is at the center of everything regardless of what kind of institution you're working in, whether that's a community-based organization, an academic medical center, or a community-based medical practice. Part of it is what I said earlier about the fact that we need to leverage each other's strengths. It’s our responsibility to treat the whole person and not just the patient's cancer. That is even another reason why we need to all come together and partner.The last thing we want to do is make somebody feel like they are only a diagnosis. And so I think that's another big takeaway.

And then the last one I would say is that it's important, especially in academic medicine, that we are collaborating with trusted members of the community, and that it's important that our patients feel comfortable to speak up and feel like they're being heard and feel like they're being represented. And so it's important that we all come together and make sure that the patients feel like they're in a safe, trusted space.