Dr. Jennifer Brown: Why Is It Important for You to Empower Patients?

Dr. Jennifer Brown: Why Is It Important for You to Empower Patients?

Dr. Jennifer Brown: Why Is It Important for You to Empower Patients? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

Why is it important to empower patients? CLL expert Dr. Jennifer Brown from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute discusses two important times to empower patients, why these times are important, and how she approaches these discussions with her patients.

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Transcript:

Dr. Jennifer Brown:

So I think there are two really important times for patients in the course of their disease. One is at diagnosis and then one is when you’re selecting therapy. And both of those times I try very much to listen to the patient’s concerns and try to address whatever their personal concerns are. Especially the newly diagnosed patients are often extremely fearful, in fact terrified, even though as we have discussed, it’s really a chronic disease that we can manage for extremely long periods of time what with patients feeling really well. And so trying to reassure patients and trying to address their fears and concerns is really important to me early on in the course of the disease. And then in terms of choosing treatment, in the majority of cases, we don’t necessarily have a clearly preferred treatment. We usually have two or three initial treatment options that may be largely equal for the majority of patients.

And so we really try to bring a shared decision-making model into that, in particular with respect to how patients feel about being on chronic therapy indefinitely versus time-limited therapy that may involve more intensive visits to the hospital early on but that then they can discontinue. And so it really ends up being a very lengthy and protracted usually over multiple visit discussion about what the treatment options are and what the patient’s values are in relation to the treatment options and how we should move forward with that. And then, we run a lot of clinical trials too, which I always recommend as an excellent option until we’re curing everyone with the disease, I think we should be doing clinical trials, and so then that makes the whole conversation even more complicated. But again, a shared decision-making model.