Addressing Cancer Care Challenges to Achieve Optimal Outcomes

Linda Bosserman, MD, PhD, FASCO, FACP, medical oncologist and professor at City of Hope, summarizes her presentation, "Challenges of Providing Therapeutic Excellence in Our Current System," from an Institute for Value-Based Medicine^® (IVBM) event held in Garden Grove, California in partnership with City of Hope.

In particular, she addresses the challenges of providing therapeutic excellence in cancer care, emphasizing the need for equitable access to effective treatments.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Transcript

Could you summarize the key points from your presentation, "Challenges of Providing Therapeutic Excellence in Our Current System"?

When we think about the challenges of providing therapeutic excellence in our current system, how do we get access for every patient to the correct initial diagnosis, the treatment that will have their best outcome, and the care that takes them through their cancer journey with the least symptoms and side effects and has them go on with their life consistent with their values and their optimum health?

Those are the challenges that we have to face, and we're looking at treatment from an academic medical center with superior experts who often focus on just one subtype of cancer. How do we share that knowledge across community networks in our center, across the country, and across the world? Those are the challenges.

Care at City of Hope has 4 big focuses. We're interested in ensuring we have caring, trailblazing, sharing, and achieving. When we talk about caring, we're really talking about patient-centered care, including their goals of care, that early detection, diagnosis, treatment, clinical trials, shared decision-making, supportive care, and survivorship care are offered to every patient.

When we talk about trailblazing, it's being on the cutting edge, discovering and implementing new treatments with better outcomes and fewer side effects. We're developing innovative care models, focusing on where the patient is, more care at home, more virtual care as well as in-person care. We're looking at expanding research and making sure our data is driving informed decision-making, and that we're offering seamless, integrated care by helping patients navigate that so they can have access to complex cancer care.

When you look at sharing, we have publications, we teach, we train fellows, we train professionals. We have new care models with a lot of patient education to involve them. We have our second opinion program through Access Hope. We have international partnerships, and then we have a lot of our published discoveries so that they're internationally available.

Then, we look at achieving. Our goal is superior cancer outcomes, which we have shown against all benchmarks for every cancer and every stage of patients treated through the City of Hope system. We want to make that a reality for others that we can partner with through Access Hope and international partnerships, as well as with every physician in our network, and that we can do that the most cost-effectively so that we're actually having value realization across the whole ecosystem.