Is Remote Monitoring for CLL Patients on CAR T Therapy the Future?
Is Remote Monitoring for CLL Patients on CAR T Therapy the Future? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Will telemedicine play a greater role in CAR T remote monitoring and help some CLL patients avoid long hospital stays? Learn how harnessing technology could optimize care for CAR T patients.
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Transcript:
Stephanie:
There’s excitement around telemedicine and CAR T, so specifically remotely monitoring CAR T to help avoid patients having to deal with long hospital stays. Is this the future?
Dr. John Pagel:
It’s clearly the future. So what you’re alluding to, of course, is a way that we are now doing to trick a patient’s own immune system cells into targeting and fighting the cancer, and of course, we’re talking about CLL here. It’s a revolutionary treatment in CLL, we still have quite a ways to go, we are doing a lot of important trials and advancing the field, but we don’t have an approved approach in CLL yet, but we will. No doubt. And the goal of that therapy is not just to eradicate the disease and keep it from coming back, but it’s also to do it in a very safe and actually appropriate way, and that’s as an outpatient.
Those patients clearly have risk for an adverse event or a side effect, that can be problematic. So they have to be in close contact with a physician and sometimes they’re required to be very close to the treating center for prolonged periods of time. Most of the time that’s very uneventful. So it’s a major disruption to a patient’s life. You could imagine that you’re traveling hundreds of miles to go to a center, and not just go to a center that provides the CAR T-cell therapy, but is actually monitoring you for a month or more, so you’re away from home for a long time, living in a hotel, that’s a problem.
Telemedicine is a way to get around that. We will evolve to being able to treat patients, get them home, and then telemedicine will work where the visits can be done in a very expeditious manner, and again, in a very appropriate way so that that will also reduce the interactions away from home, and as we said cost of care as well.
