Elizabeth Gregerson

Welcome to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast.

I'm Elizabeth Gregerson, a reporter here at Becker's, and I'm thrilled to interview Dr. Deborah Wong.

She's a medical oncologist at City of Hope and medical director of Access Hope.

Dr. Wang, thank you so much for joining me.

I'm so grateful to have you on today to share your insights with our podcast audience.

Before I dive into my questions, could you just briefly introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background and your organization?

Great.

That leads perfectly into kind of our discussion today.

You had a recent study come out that highlighted how remote second opinions from NCI designated specialists are

led to changes in treatment recommendations for over half of the cancer cases reviewed.

What were some of the key infrastructure or technology enablers that made this kind of, you know, academic to community collaboration possible at scale?

You know, what did it take to kind of scale all these remote second opinions?

Perfect.

And I wanted to highlight too, one of the key findings of the study was that patients in non-urban or disadvantaged areas were significantly more likely to benefit from those treatment changes that happened after receiving the second opinion from an NCI designated specialist.

I'd love for you to walk us through, you know, what that finding tells us

about what health systems could or perhaps what they should be doing to better support the frontline oncologists that are practicing in those resource-limited settings.

I feel like that's such an important point, too, and something, you know, we might take for granted when we think of cancer care access.

You know, our default might be just we're thinking treatment, we're thinking screening, but it's those supportive services, like you said, that really make a difference.

So I appreciate how the study kind of lined that out as well.

So in this time post-COVID, most hospital and health systems have virtual care capabilities, whether that's through telehealth, whether that's through Zoom committees that they routinely run, tumor boards, things like that.