Should Prostate Cancer Patients and Families Keep Using Telemedicine?

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Should Prostate Cancer Patients and Families Keep Using Telemedicine? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

 Prostate cancer patients can still utilize telemedicine after COVID-19 restrictions have lessened. Dr. Heather Cheng from Seattle Cancer Care Alliance shares information about situations when telemedicine visits can be helpful for patients.

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Transcript:

Sherea Cary:

Dr. Cheng, now that telemedicine has broader applications, should prostate cancer patients and families keep telemedicine in their toolbox post-COVID?

Dr. Heather Cheng:

Yes, I actually think it’s one of the…telemedicine, in general, is one of the silver linings of COVID, I think from a member of the medical community, we had to learn…actually, I was already doing some telemedicine, limited telemedicine before COVID hit. But I do think for patients who have access to an Internet or a smartphone and are able to do their visits, it is really decreasing the burden on them in terms of how much time they have to take off work to go to their medical appointments, I think there are times when patients still have to go into clinic, for example, to get treatment, but a lot of times, at least for prostate cancer patients, they can have their PSA that prostate-specific antigen blood test, checked in a lab close to their home, and then you know, at a time that’s convenient to them. And then I can do a telehealth with them later, so that they don’t have to take as much time off work. And so, I think in some cases it’s really, really made it easier for patients, although there are still times when we do need to see them in person, it’s just really nice to have that as an option.

So, I really do think that’s a really good thing, and I hope that the medical community and patients can continue to benefit from that. The other time when it’s helpful is for second opinions and consultation, so this is also really important for patients to know about it, is the first time they’re making a big decision about their treatment and they’re not 100 percent sure maybe they want to get us that an opinion, just to make sure that other doctors agree and that they get another chance to hear the treatment options explained in a different way. And I see a lot of patients for second opinions just to kind of get more confidence, maybe they’ll still decide to get treatment with their local oncologist, because it’s easier closer to home and less disruptive than to come to see us in Seattle. But it still gives them more confidence that they’re going down the right treatment path, so I think telemedicine also makes that a lot easier for patients as well.

How Does Stress Correlate With Your Prostate Cancer Diagnosis?

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How Does Stress Correlate With Your Prostate Cancer Diagnosis? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo. 

How do stress and cortisol levels contribute to prostate cancer incidence and aggressiveness in Black men? Dr. Leanne Burnham explains her research studies where they looked specifically at the role of stress in prostate cancer, tumor aggressiveness, and Black men — and also shares research about cortisol levels in African American children.

See More From the Prostate Cancer TelemEDucation Empowerment Resource Center

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What Are Some Hereditary Factors Impacting Prostate Cancer Patients?

Top Tips and Advice for Prostate Cancer Patients and Caregivers Navigating Treatment

Should Prostate Cancer Screening Happen at an Earlier Age for Certain Patient Populations?
 

Transcript:

Dr. Leanne Burnham

I have a few publications that look at the role of stress and prostate cancer, tumor aggressiveness, and Black men. And so, I looked at Black men specifically, because I have wondered if Black men who maybe were exposed to more stressors in their lifetime if that had any correlation to Black men getting prostate cancer earlier in their life and getting a more aggressive disease. And so, there were very realistic ways that we were able to look at that in the lab and then also in collaboration with public health colleagues that I have. Because what we know there are studies that show that African American children experience more stress, and their cortisol levels in their bodies are effective much earlier than any other race, and their studies that show the distress begins in the daycare setting based on discrimination that they may have from the adults that are taking care of them in that setting. And so, imagine cumulatively how that looks, and so we have ways that there are validated scales to assess levels of stressors that people have been exposed to. So that could be…what are your finances looking like? Have you been affected by incarceration yourself or anyone in your family? Have you experienced the death of a loved one? Has your home been broken into recently?

There are all kinds of, there are hundreds and hundreds of questions, and we can get to the root of how much stress has somebody been exposed to. And we know that unfortunately, African Americans in this country are exposed to more of these stressors than other demographics, and so what we did was look at the elevated stress, we could look at the cellular level and see, now if we’re growing prostate cancer cells, so that’s what I did. I was growing cancer cells in the lab that were from Black patients and white patients, and I would expose them to stress hormones in the flask, or maybe you like to think of it as kind of like a petri dish, but in the flask where the prostate cancer cells were growing. I would treat them with stress hormones, and then I would look and see do the cells grow differently, do they express genes and proteins differently based on race? And what I found very surprisingly, disturbingly, whichever adverb you want to use, that the African American prostate cancer cells, when they were exposed to stress hormones, the tumor cells became more aggressive, and they up-regulated genes that we know prime a patient to resist therapy.

So, the genes that were up-regulated in these prostate cancer cells are genes that we know, let’s say if a patient were to get chemotherapy, that patient would be more likely to fail that chemotherapy early, which is a terminology we call chemo resistance. And so those are studies right now that have just sort of, they’re newer to the forefront looking at stress and tumor aggressiveness. But there are studies going on nationwide right now involving thousands of African American men participants, where we are looking at the role of stress and what that does in terms of prostate cancer, aggressiveness in Black men specifically, and seeing what we can do to address it. But first we have to acknowledge that the problem is even there, a lot of people don’t think the problem is there, but we are scientists, we think the problem is there. So, we have to get the data to show the public that the problem is there, and then we need to really address the systemic racism that leads to this elevated and chronic stress that other demographics don’t have to deal with, because it’s literally leading to increased disease and increased health disparities. And if that’s something that we can change at some very basic levels, then that will improve health overall.

Should Prostate Cancer Screening Happen at an Earlier Age for Certain Patient Populations?

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Should Prostate Cancer Screening Happen at an Earlier Age for Certain Patient Populations? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo. 

Should prostate cancer screening be done sooner for some men? Expert Dr. Leanne Burnham details screening guidelines from the American Cancer Society and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, how guidelines differ for Black men, and when to advocate for earlier screening.

See More From the Prostate Cancer TelemEDucation Empowerment Resource Center

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What Are Some Hereditary Factors Impacting Prostate Cancer Patients?

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How Does Stress Correlate With Your Prostate Cancer Diagnosis?
 

Transcript:

Dr. Leanne Burnham

In terms of prostate cancer screening, the current recommendation by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is that men between the ages of 55 to 69 have a discussion with their physician about whether or not they should be screened. Okay, now the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force base this decision on studies, as I mentioned earlier, in predominantly white men, if you look at American Cancer Society, the recommendation is that African American men are screened at age 45 and African American men who are 40, but have a family history of prostate cancer should be screened at age 40. So the issue is most physicians follow the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation for white men. And so, if you have a family history, or if you’re just 45 and you want to know, do you have prostate cancer, you have the right to ask your physician and let them know. Show them on your phone, American Cancer Society recommends this for me because of my race, because of my family history, and your insurance will cover that. Now, these recommendations for Black men in their 40s are not just for no reason, it’s because we see prostate cancer in men at this age, like I said before, my dad being diagnosed at 50 with a PSA score of 64 means that he was growing prostate cancer in his 40s, and who knows how early in his 40s if that was happening. At City of Hope, we provide free prostate cancer screening in the community, and there’s thousands of men that are eligible to be screened, and what we see is there are men in their 40s that have elevated PSA, and if we can catch that early enough, that’s a game changer for them in terms of the length of their life and the quality of their life that they’ll have moving forward.

So, one thing that we see in the community, and I talk to a lot of men about, is not even just men, people in general, trust their doctor, right, they trust to speak to their physician. If the physician says, “It’s your annual visit, you need to have A, B, and C done.” A lot of the men, they’ll say, “Oh, I went to the doctor, I had everything done,” and we really have to let them know your doctor may not have included that with everything else. Yes, you’ve got your blood pressure checked, your blood sugar, and they checked your weight and all this, but go through your record, and a lot of these records are electronically available in apps now and see. Just look at your app and see, did they test for PSA? And if they didn’t and you’re 45 and you’re African American or you’re 40 and you have family members, then that’s something you can shoot your doctor an email and request and just say, “You know, I’m concerned about this, and I would really like to have this test done based on American Cancer Society’s recommendations.” And what we see a lot of times too in the community, is men will say, “Well, I feel fine.”

Well, what you need to understand about prostate cancer is, men do not have symptoms unfortunately until it is beyond early stages is how it works, and so as men get older, the prostate enlarges, whether or not they have prostate cancer or not, and it causes a frequency in urination especially at nighttime. So, if you have a frequency in urination, it will occur as you get older, that’s something you need to let your doctor know. It may not be prostate cancer, so don’t freak out, but it very well may be other symptoms as prostate cancer progresses include back pain, sometimes sexual dysfunction, things like that start to occur, and back pain can be anything. So that’s why it’s important to get your PSA tested even if you don’t have symptoms, because I can tell you that, my dad did not have any symptoms with a PSA of 64, and the only reason I found that was on accident in an emergency room, he went to the ER after having a colonoscopy. And my dad never got sick for anything that he didn’t even understand what physical discomfort means, and he had a colonoscopy, and you know, when you get a colonoscopy, they tell you afterwards, you may have some gas pain, he never had gas pain. So, he didn’t know when his stomach was hurting so bad afterwards, he just thought, this is not okay, this is not okay, he goes to emergency room, they say, Listen, sir, it’s just gas from your colonoscopy, by the way, we ran your blood work, your PSA is extremely elevated. He found out on accident. Who knows how much longer that would have been growing after that, and so I say all that to say, do not expect, do not wait for symptoms to come, and that Black men do get prostate cancer young and that you wanna catch it early because then you have a 100 percent cure rate when you catch it early, so it just makes the most sense to stay on top of it.

Top Tips and Advice for Prostate Cancer Patients and Caregivers Navigating Treatment

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Top Tips and Advice for Prostate Cancer Patients and Caregivers Navigating Treatment from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo. 

What should prostate cancer patients and caregivers know about prostate cancer treatment? Dr. Leanne Burnham shares advice for patients with concerns about treatment side effects, information about active surveillance, and some specific advice for Black men with prostate cancer.

See More From the Prostate Cancer TelemEDucation Empowerment Resource Center

Related Resources:

 

What Are Some Hereditary Factors Impacting Prostate Cancer Patients?

Should Prostate Cancer Screening Happen at an Earlier Age for Certain Patient Populations?

How Does Stress Correlate With Your Prostate Cancer Diagnosis?
 

Transcript:

Dr. Leanne Burnham

Yes, so it is a couples’ disease for sure, and you want to make sure to do a little bit of your own research. Make sure that your doctor knows how this disease affects Black men differently, because what I see a lot of time, even in my own family, my husband’s family members that get prostate cancer and they come to me, a lot of times, their doctor will recommend active surveillance. And it may not be appropriate for African American men if you look at the research and you look at the studies. And so, it may benefit you to just ask your doctor, “Do you treat a lot of Black patients, or do you see any difference in their survival rates versus your other patients?” And really consider that when you’re thinking about whether to do active surveillance or not. Once it gets time for treatments, one thing when I — because I talk to a lot of men and support groups, and men are scared, they don’t want to lose their urinary function, they don’t want to lose their sexual function. And so, they’re nervous about certain diseases and in terms of surgeries and radical prostatectomy, there are nerve-sparing surgeries now to really protect that function afterwards, and there are exercises that can be done afterwards to also help improve, and so ask the nurses in your setting, “What are some of those exercises that can be done?” But one thing to keep in mind is every treatment comes with its sort of risk, right?

So, no matter whether you choose radiation or surgery, there’s always a risk that you may lose some of that function, what I tell men, and not to sound not sensitive to the matter, but a lot of men, they’ll say, you know, “Oh, if I get this treatment and what if I can’t have sex anymore?” You’re not going to have sex when you’re buried 6 feet underground either. And so, you want to be able to get those treatments, the ones that you and your physician have a shared decision in and in deciding what’s best as a couple. But you don’t want to be naive if you’re at the doctor and you have a really elevated PSA and you have a Gleason score of 8, and your doctor is telling you, “We really need to treat this,” you don’t want to shy away from that, because you’re scared of the side of the side effects in that setting. You can look for where the best surgery center is if they have the nerve-sparing surgery, as I said, and explore your options that way. But don’t put it off so long, because you’re worried about the side effects. And if you don’t get treatment and your doctor wants you to, as time goes on, you’ll lose the urinary function and the sexual function anyways.

So yeah, it’s not something that you want to put off because you’re scared about the side effects. And a lot of men do have side effects temporarily, and then they regain their function, and I really encourage to join support groups virtually now because of how the role is set up. But just talk to some other men that have had some of these procedures and see how they’re doing. And I personally haven’t met a man that felt like, “Oh, I have been cured from prostate cancer, and now I have the side effects, and I wish I wouldn’t have had the procedure,” I haven’t met one. And I know in those who have side effects and they had surgeries and 10, 15 years ago, and they have side effects, I’m not going to act like that doesn’t happen. But none of them have ever expressed to me that they wish they could go back in time and not do that, because, at the end of the day, they’re grateful that they are still here with their loved ones.

What Are Some Hereditary Factors Impacting Prostate Cancer Patients?

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What Are Some Hereditary Factors Impacting Prostate Cancer Patients? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

Along with aging, hereditary factors also contribute to prostate cancer incidence. Expert Dr. Leanne Burnham details some of the hereditary factors, their mechanism of action, and some treatments under study in prostate cancer clinical trials for African American men.

See More From the Prostate Cancer TelemEDucation Empowerment Resource Center

Related Resources:

 

Top Tips and Advice for Prostate Cancer Patients and Caregivers Navigating Treatment

Should Prostate Cancer Screening Happen at an Earlier Age for Certain Patient Populations?

How Does Stress Correlate With Your Prostate Cancer Diagnosis?
 

Transcript:

Dr. Leanne Burnham

So, cancer is a disease of aging, and cancer is a hereditary disease for a lot of different kinds of cancers, not all, but for a lot of them. And so prostate cancer is one of those that we know for sure that there are some genetic variations that are passed down from our parents that would make men either predisposed or not to get prostate cancer and also would predispose them to get aggressive prostate cancer.

And so, for example, if you have a father, an uncle, grandfather, if you have family members that have had prostate cancer, and beyond that, if you had women in your family that have had breast cancer, then that increases your chance as a man to get prostate cancer and to get it even younger than other races would. And so certain things that we look at in the lab and in the clinic at City of Hope are really trying to understand what those hereditary factors are, and then how you can target them with drug treatments specifically.

So, for example, we have a clinical trial that a team of us developed, and we are looking at the ability of something called PARP inhibitor not to get too technical with you, but PARP inhibitors, if you want to Google it, they are at the forefront of prostate cancer treatments right now, and especially a few running in clinical trials. And so there is a hereditary disposition, there is a mutation on the BRCA gene that leads to PARP inhibitors benefiting any person that would have that BRCA mutation.

What we’re doing in our clinical trial is we are using a PARP inhibitor called talazoparib (Talzenna), and we are not only providing that to patients that have the spark commutation, but we are extending it to patients that may not have that mutation, and the reason for is because, and I definitely don’t want to get crazy technical, but the reason for it in a nutshell, as we know in cancer there is an interaction between PARP inhibition and androgen receptor function and reaction to treatments. And so, you may have heard of androgen and androgen receptor when it comes to prostate cancer, it’s really the fancy way of saying testosterone, and prostate cancer needs testosterone, or it needs androgen and androgen receptor to function and to grow. And so, what we want to see in this clinical trial is if we target, if we use PARP inhibitors in combination with hormone therapy that’s targeting androgen production androgen receptor, will we see better treatment and better response to the drugs in those patients. And the extra cool part to me is we know that there are variations in DNA segments that affect androgen receptor function in African American men. And so, for a specific mechanism that I won’t dive into, it involves trinucleotide repeats and link, segments links and all this, but because of these variations and androgen receptor in African American men that we know was associated with their ancestry and what they’ve inherited in their own DNA, this drug should work better in African American men. And we will be able to tease that out in this clinical trial. So, it’s an opportunity for African American men who have prostate cancer who have not developed castration resistance yet, but who do have metastatic prostate cancer so, at that point, there is not a cure, right, and so you can go to your physician, and you can get a standard of care therapy, or you may want to consider this clinical trial where you would receive standard care therapy. And then also, as I said before this VIP access to this new drug, this PARP inhibitor that we think may improve outcomes in men.

Dr. Leanne Burnham’s Top Tips for Your Prostate Cancer Telemedicine Visit

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Dr. Leanne Burnham’s Top Tips for Your Prostate Cancer Telemedicine Visit from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo. 

What are some ways that prostate cancer patients can prepare for telemedicine visits? Dr. Leanne Burnham shares her top tips for ensuring success and for getting the most out of televisit appointments.

See More From the Prostate Cancer TelemEDucation Empowerment Resource Center

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What Prostate Cancer Populations Will Benefit Most From Telemedicine?

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What Are the Benefits of Telemedicine for Prostate Cancer Patients?
 

Transcript:

Dr. Leanne Burnham

Okay, my top three tips to prepare for a telemedicine visit is if you would usually have an advocate come with you to your in-person doctor’s appointment, try to make that happen for your televisit appointment as well. And explain to your physician when you get on the call say, “Hey, this is my wife, this is my husband, and they’re going to be joining the call if they have a few questions too, and I would like to have them be involved as part of the conversation.” The other thing is to have your questions prepared ahead of time, you know, and a lot of people have questions prepared ahead of time for in-person visits, but they might be nervous, they might keep their questions tucked away, well, this way your questions can be on the table next to you. Your doctor doesn’t even know, you still get to ask those questions though, and then the third tip that I would have is to allow for technology to mess up. So, for your visits, a lot of times your physician may give you a window where they say, “We’re going to call you between such and such time,” such as such time, you just sitting there waiting for them to call. But I say give yourself even more time than that in case you know something’s going on with your Internet or you are just not able to log into the app well, because I did have that happen to me personally, one time with the physician, and they were trying to get ahold of me, and I was having trouble connecting, and then he emailed me later saying, “You missed our appointment.”

I really wasn’t trying to miss the appointment, so just give yourself that extra time to get your technology together.

How Will Telemedicine Impact Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials?

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How Will Telemedicine Impact Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo. 

How will prostate cancer clinical trials be changed by the addition of telemedicine to the treatment toolbox? Expert Dr. Leanne Burnham details patients who can benefit from telemedicine visits — and explains some of the history of discrimination in medical care for BIPOC patients and treatment response of African American men with prostate cancer

See More From the Prostate Cancer TelemEDucation Empowerment Resource Center

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Will Telemedicine Mitigate Financial Toxicity for Prostate Cancer Patients?

What Are the Limitations of Telemedicine for Prostate Cancer Patients?

Dr. Leanne Burnham’s Top Tips for Your Prostate Cancer Telemedicine Visit
 

Transcript:

Dr. Leanne Burnham

So clinical trials, the whole concept of clinical trials has really come to the forefront of the media right now with everything that’s happened in 2020 and currently with COVID.

And so a lot of people, if they were not aware of discrimination in medical care or clinical trials in the history of the U.S., then now they’re starting to become well-versed in it. So now people are hearing, “Oh, Tuskegee syphilis experiment,” where those of us who are in science, in medicine study health series research is, this is not new to us, so we’re grateful that it’s coming to the forefront. People are learning about it, but there is a justifiable medical mistrust by many Black and Brown people, but African Americans in particular, because of what has been done and not done in terms of medical treatment in the past 400 years. And so, because of this medical mistrust, that leads to sometimes a hesitancy to participate in clinical trials, because there’s an idea of, I don’t want to be a guinea pig, so that’s just one aspect that leads to less enrollment in clinical trials. There’s the whole other side of things, right? There’s the fact that a lot of African American patients are not asked to be in a clinical trial, they’re not explained what the clinical trial entails, a lot of people don’t realize that clinical trial patients have access to what I call what I consider to be VIP access to what is cutting-edge, and it doesn’t mean that it’s not new, that it hasn’t been tested extensively. It’s just now that it’s available to a patient at a particular disease stage that we might be looking at, and we have a lot of reason to believe that it will help that patient.

So a patient that’s enrolling in a clinical trial has access to the VIP treatment. And then as an added bonus, they actually have extra engagement with providers, extra touchpoints with their providers that patients that are receiving standard of care and not enrolled in a clinical trial don’t have as much access to. That being said, in addition to that, for us to really forward medicine in what we call precision medicine, which is able to have medication that’s tailored to an individual person based on their DNA makeup, based on how their body would individually respond to a drug. It’s super important, highly important that we have diversity in patients that are enrolled in clinical trials. For example, if you don’t have enough African American men enrolled in the clinical trial for prostate cancer, then you don’t really know if that medication would work worse or even better in that patient. And what we’re actually seeing is there has been a development of race-stratified clinical trials in the past less than 10 years, really around five years, where we’ve looked at chemotherapy, we looked at hormone therapy, and we looked at immunotherapy, where we include enough African American men in the trials, and we look at how the drug responds in African American men versus other men. And we see that African American men actually have a better treatment response than other races, so how amazing is that? Where you have a demographic that is more likely to get aggressive prostate cancer and die much younger, and we’re seeing that if they’re given the new treatments that are really tailored to target the disease in ways that we weren’t able to do it before, that they’re responding better and having longer survival and better outcomes. And so it’s really important for all those reasons I described to increase African American participation in clinical trials.

Now, I say all that to get to this point, which is, enrollment is not easy when you don’t live near a clinical trial center or a hospital that’s offering whatever treatment you’re interested in trying out as part of a trial. And so we know that race in this country is tied to geographic location, it’s tied to socio-economic status, and so what telemedicine provides is in previous instances where maybe a patient lives out the way 60 miles or more from an institution that has a clinical trial that they would want to be involved in, now they don’t have to drive to that center. They can have a telemedicine visit, they can conduct labs where they’re at near their home, see if they qualify to participate in the clinical trial based on their own body’s physiology and how their blood work comes out and how their imaging comes out, see if they qualify. And then they can enroll in that clinical trial, and so telemedicine in that aspect really opens the door to people who may have been interested who live out of the way, maybe even in a rural setting where the institutions that they have nearby, don’t have what they are interested in using or what may be best for their treatment plan personally, and so telemedicine opens a whole new world to patients such as those.

What Prostate Cancer Populations Will Benefit Most From Telemedicine?

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What Prostate Cancer Population Will Benefit Most From Telemedicine? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo. 

With a lack of staging in prostate cancer, which patients can benefit the most from telemedicine visits? Dr. Leanne Burnham maps out factors that may make some patients lower risk and situations that may warrant other patients to be seen in person to receive optimal prostate cancer care.

See More From the Prostate Cancer TelemEDucation Empowerment Resource Center

Related Resources:

 

How Will Telemedicine Impact Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials?

What Are the Limitations of Telemedicine for Prostate Cancer Patients?

Will Telemedicine Mitigate Financial Toxicity for Prostate Cancer Patients?
 

Transcript:

Dr. Leanne Burnham

So, prostate cancer is a very diverse disease. It presents itself differently in the clinic in each individual patient, so who is considered low risk, who is considered high risk is really a personal conversation that you have with your physician one-on-one, and it’s based on a lot of different factors. It’s not as cut and dry as some other cancers where you may break the disease down by just stage, simply stage I, stage II, stage III, stage IV. There’s a lot that goes into determining how aggressive someone’s prostate cancer tumors are. That being said, if you are considered to be low risk, you may be undergoing active surveillance by your physician or watchful waiting and in that situation, telemedicine would probably be a perfect approach where you get your labs done every few months or whatever your physician decides. And they can track your PSA velocity or doubling time and seeing if your PSA is growing, by growing I mean increasing in circulation or if it’s not which would be ideal. If you are more high risk, then you may need to increase your telemedicine visits. And, of course, if you are taking therapies that cannot be done from home, then you would need to go to a clinical setting, so that would include radiation of course, and chemotherapy, immunotherapy, perhaps. If you’re enrolled in a clinical trial where you need to go on-site to receive the medication, then that’s something that cannot just be done by telemedicine, you would have to go in-person.

What Are the Limitations of Telemedicine for Prostate Cancer Patients?

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What Are the Limitations of Telemedicine for Prostate Cancer Patients? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo. 

For prostate cancer care, what are some differences that patients experience with telemedicine visits rather than in-person visits? Dr. Leanne Burnham details some telehealth limitations that she has noticed in care for her patients.

See More From the Prostate Cancer TelemEDucation Empowerment Resource Center

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What Are the Benefits of Telemedicine for Prostate Cancer Patients?

What Prostate Cancer Populations Will Benefit Most From Telemedicine?

Will Telemedicine Mitigate Financial Toxicity for Prostate Cancer Patients?
 

Transcript:

Dr. Leanne Burnham

Well, some limitations that we’re seeing with telemedicine use, I can speak to, not only as a scientist, but also as an advocate for my loved ones, and seeing how telemedicine works in real time. It’s a little bit different when you can’t have your spouse or your parent or your sibling come with you into an office visit. Having your advocate sitting next to you on a virtual visit can come across a little bit more differently than when it’s in-person, and so that some of the personal effects are lost, I feel at times with the telemedicine approach. Then there’s also the idea of a telemedicine appointment often being like a double appointment, so let’s say, for example, if I were to go to a doctor in-person and I need to have some lab work done, you kind of can get it done at the same time. You go to your appointment, and then you go around the corner to get your labs done. Whereas now it may be that you have a telemedicine visit, and now it’s like, okay, you need to go get those labs, so you still have to find other time where you have to go and get that done, so it can tend to spread the experience out for some people.

What Are the Benefits of Telemedicine for Prostate Cancer Patients?

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What Are the Benefits of Telemedicine for Prostate Cancer Patients? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo. 

What are some of the telemedicine benefits that prostate cancer patients can experience beyond the most obvious ones? Expert Dr. Leanne Burnham shares patient safety, logistical, and care option benefits that she has seen with telehealth for her patients — and also shares the percentage of prostate cancer patients who prefer virtual visits

See More From the Prostate Cancer TelemEDucation Empowerment Resource Center

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Dr. Leanne Burnham’s Top Tips for Your Prostate Cancer Telemedicine Visit

What Prostate Cancer Populations Will Benefit Most From Telemedicine?

How Will Telemedicine Impact Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials?
 

Transcript:

Dr. Leanne Burnham

So telemedicine is presenting all kinds of new opportunities for any patient, but in terms of prostate cancer patients they fall into that category as well. What we’re seeing is that actually, the majority of patients prefer telemedicine upwards of 75 percent prefer to have that option, and adding virtual care has a few benefits including you don’t have to travel to the doctor, and you have access to maybe more options, more physician options, more institutional options. Maybe there’s a setting where they have a treatment that the location that you previously have gone to, doesn’t have. You have an option to network outside of your usual team to speak with other specialists, maybe get a second opinion. So that is something that patients are really saying that they like in the time of COVID that we are right now, where telemedicine is definitely increasing.