We Do Our Best to Serve the Community: Cathy Eng, MD, FACP, FASCO

Concluding this recent interview with Cathy Eng, MD, FACP, FASCO, she speaks on several of the clinical and operational priorities that academic medical centers make front-and-center when caring for underserved populations receiving treatment for cancer. She also stresses recognizing barriers to care access and remaining flexible with patient outreach. The role of artificial intelligence (AI) is also touched on, for its ability to enhance efficiency, as is the ongoing ability to use telehealth for maintaining patient engagement.

Part 1 of the interview focused on personalizing treatment, and part 2, building communities around patients.

Eng is codirector, GI Oncology; coleader, GI Cancer Research Program; and director, Young Adult Cancers Program, at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

What is the biggest challenge and opportunity in caring for underserved populations in an academic medical setting?

I would say the most important aspect in regard to our underserved patient population is that, I think at the end of the day, not just our institution, but others will definitely focus on patient care regardless. I understand we can't necessarily take in every single patient that comes in, but we do our best to serve the community, and I think that's a critical importance to understand.

I know our institution does a fair amount of free health care, because obviously, there are patients that we understand need our services, and we're not going to turn them away if they really need access to our medical facility. And if we can't give them access here, we often are willing to try to find them access somewhere else.

I think physicians in general really do make a conscious effort when you're in an academic setting, and especially working at a level one trauma center, that we really do make a concerted effort to provide excellent health care to our patient population, regardless of financial status.

What role do you see AI playing in the future of research and clinical outreach in oncology?

I would say AI is a lucrative part of almost everything we're doing nowadays. Whether it's a phone app for us to be able to reach our patients or complete appeal letters to assist us to making it a faster process vs using AI techniques in order to improve our research approaches. I would tell you that there are a lot of ongoing developments in that aspect. We have some really amazing technology that is being incorporated into our cancer care.

And in regard to outreach, I think that not only do we want to maintain communication with patients and understand obviously that access and transportation can be challenging, until they tell us otherwise, we will continue to do telemedicine as long as the patient lives in the state of Tennessee or anywhere else we're licensed. Some of us have additional licenses outside of Tennessee, but not everybody, but we will continue to utilize those services as long as we can.

We understand not every single patient needs to be seen every single time they come in, but maybe just to check up on them and see how they're doing. And I think that AI is the new technology that we all have to incorporate into our lives. At the end of the day, I think it makes us more efficient, and I hope that we can utilize our additional time. Hopefully, there will be additional time that has been developed as a result of the improvements in efficiency that we can then apply to something else.