Dr James Hamrick Outlines Best Practices for Understanding What Patients Value

In order to understand what brings value to patients, you have to talk and listen to them, and you’ve got to do that in an intentional, thought through way, explained James Hamrick, MD, senior medical director at Flatiron Health.

Transcript

What are some best practices for understanding what constitutes value for patients?

The first best practice to understand what brings value to patients is to talk to patients and listen to patients, and you’ve got to do that in an intentional, thought through way, because if you just try to work with your own assumptions, you’re going to be wrong a lot of the time. I go back to this idea of meeting patients where they are and making sure you design products that work within what they’re doing already in their life instead of requiring a whole lot of extra energy to access some sort of technology tool.

And I think in addition, we’ve recognized more and more that cancer care is very much a team sport. I see a lot of the practices that we work with build out things beyond just the traditional physician and nurse practitioner. We’ve talked to one practice that actually has group visits across the whole team. So, when a patient comes in and is going to begin treatment, they have an opportunity in a group setting to meet not only their physician but the infusion nurse who’s going to do their chemotherapy, the financial counselor who’s going to make sure they’re going to get their treatment without going bankrupt, the support teams that are going to be contacting them at multiple points along their journey to help them.