What Prostate Cancer Populations Will Benefit Most From Telemedicine?
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:
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.
