Scaling Precision Medicine Expertise for Equitable Cancer Care: Breaking Barriers, Advancing Patient Outcomes

The CPC and CBEx Annual Congress, on October 6-8, creates an interactive environment for cancer care stakeholders to explore and share practical approaches to relevant issues.

CBEx Advisory Board Member James Hamrick, MD, MPH, Flatiron Health, previews his featured session, “Scaling Precision Medicine Expertise for Equitable Cancer Care: Breaking Barriers, Advancing Patient Outcomes,” which will include participation from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. The panelists will discuss the areas of success and failure in implementing precision medicine into practice, and how doing so can lead to more equitable cancer care.

Register today to improve your practical knowledge about how to effectively implement cancer care at home so it best serves the patients.

Transcript:

James Hamrick, MD, MPH: Hello, my name is Dr James Hamrick. I'm a medical oncologist and vice president of clinical oncology at Flatiron Health, and I'm excited to be participating in the session entitled “Scaling Precision Medicine for Equitable Cancer Care: Breaking Barriers, Advancing Patient Outcomes.”

This topic is incredibly relevant to the cancer care space because precision medicine actually is sort of the heart of all cancer care at this point. So much of what we do in medicine involves a process you can think about in terms of identifying a tumor; understanding tumor biology to identify targets that you can think about for therapeutic options; of course, knowing your patient and their personal needs and preferences; making a good treatment selection to optimize for the outcome; and then being able to execute on that treatment.

We're going to talk about the different steps and the different points of potential failure and success that can trip people up or enable doctors and patients to make the best decisions, to drive high-quality care, which, of course, also means equitable care.

The main points that we're going to cover in this session really are the perspectives of the three different stakeholders that we have. So, we have one stakeholder that is really expert on interpreting complex genomic data and helping make sure that doctors have that information at their fingertips. We have another expert, myself, that is thinking about how we can use technology right in the work flow of the physician to enable them to make a really good care decision in the precision medicine context without slowing them down, because the clinicians are really busy, and they need that information at the right time.

And then, finally, we've got representation from NCCN, and they are the standard of evidence-based care guidelines in the cancer space. So, I'm very excited for those three different viewpoints to come in and think about what the challenges are in terms of delivering high-quality, equitable care in the era of precision medicine.

I'm most excited to discuss the ways that technology can really layer into physician workflows and solve problems as they exist for physicians now to let them continue to be very efficient but make really good decisions that are based on the best science and are likely to give people the best outcomes.

I'm really excited about the content in the meeting this year. In terms of the clinical pathways content, I know that there are a lot of sessions that I'm looking forward to attending. I'm going to be appearing in one talking about artificial intelligence and the impact that that may have on the care space. And there are a number of other sessions that I plan to attend, because it really is going to speak to the cutting edge of precision medicine.

I'm really excited to be in Boston in early October, where it's going to be a great meeting with a lot of colleagues and a lot of the key opinion leaders who are in the space of figuring out how we deliver better outcomes for patients.