Expanding the Conversation

Today we are presenting a poster at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium on a project we have been working on for nearly a year with collaborators from MD Anderson, the University of Pittsburgh, and UCLA. I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you more about it.

theMednet has been a special place where we could post our "real world" questions, get expert input, and learn from each others' experiences. Last year, we had an idea: what if we could learn about the types of discussions that are happening at top cancer centers around the country?

What if, instead of being restricted to the cancer centers, those conversations could be shared with all of us? We started speaking with Dr. Oliver Bogler, the Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs at MD Anderson Cancer Center, and he was on board! So we collaborated with Dr. Debu Tripathy, Dr. Meghan Karuturi, and the breast cancer team at MDA to design a process to capture and share knowledge from the MDA Breast Planning Conference.

In the Spring, we invited UPMC and UCLA to be a part of this initiative. Dr. Rachel Jankowitz and Dr. Kelly McCann lead the efforts. We have since documented 41 breast cancer Q&A from these 3 NCI-CCC's, which have been read by 700 oncologists across 49 states. This map shows the reach of the program:

We are presenting our initial results at SABCS tonight. Maitri Kalra, PGY-6 at Indiana University, received the AACR Scholar-in-Training Award for the project!

Maitri and I are now working on growing this program. Ultimately the goal is to expand to 10 NCI-CCC's for multiple disease site. Interesting in getting your NCI-CCC involved? Feel free to reach out to Maitri (maiti@themednet.org) or myself (nadine@themednet.org).

If you happen to be at SABCS, please stop by our poster P5-16-01 at the 5-7pm poster session tonight!