Clinical Pathways: The Future of Cancer Care

Tatjana Kolevska, MD, medical oncologist at Kaiser Permanente and medical director of the Kaiser Permanente National Cancer Excellence Program, describes how the doubling time of medical knowledge is now only 3 months, which creates the need for clinical pathways and paves the way for pathways becoming the future of cancer care.

Transcript

Hello, I am Tatjana Kolevska. I'm a medical oncologist from Kaiser Permanente, and I'm a medical director of the Kaiser Permanente National Cancer Excellence Program. In this amazing meeting, Cancer Pathways This Year, we are seeing three different topics that come to mind that are moving us forward.

The first one is the obvious notion that clinical pathways are becoming the way of the cancer care future. And if we ask ourselves, "Well, why is that? Why could have physicians for the last 4 or 500 years be able to go treat their patients one patient at a time, and now all of a sudden, we need clinical pathways?"

And the reason might lie in the fact that, in the 1920s, the doubling time of medical knowledge was about 70 years. So doctors can do their medical school and they were ready for their 20- or 30-year career.

Well, in the 1970s, the doubling of the medical knowledge was cut down to about 7 years. So all the doctors have to re-certify every 10 years. And right now, the doubling time of medical knowledge is 3 months. So, no human being can keep up with everything, and that's why pathways have been so helpful and so instrumental in the adopting of the best medical knowledge, the most cutting-edge treatments for all cancer patients across the communities, universities, and basically, across the nation.