Telehealth Program for Older Patients & Decision Preferences in AML | Jane Liesveld, MD | ASH 2023

Good morning, I'm Jane Liesveld from the University of Rochester. I'm a physician and a professor of medicine at the Medical Center and it's my pleasure to share with you a couple abstracts that are presented by our group at the American Society of Hematology meeting this year. This meeting always has so much related to AML and a couple of the abstracts from our group that I wanted to focus on are kind of in the realm of patient education and communication and I think that while there's so much here that's presented that has to do with therapeutics and looking at new therapeutics and that is of course the prime reason that we do leukemia research is to improve outcomes for our patients. There's so many other things involved in leukemia care that we need to pay attention to and a couple of the abstracts that I want to highlight deal with those issues. One was presented by one of our medical students Marissa Locastro who's working with Dr. Melissa Low and is involved in a lot of research projects and what she's interested in is when and how we present to patients with a new diagnosis of AML what some of their goals of care are as they go through treatments and she along with Dr. Low has developed a telehealth communication system where patients in the comfort of their own home are able to talk to their physicians or another member of the healthcare team and to define you know what some of their important goals are as they go through treatment so that they can look at end of life care what their goals are in terms of treatment and other aspects of their care as they go through the AML journey and I think the first part of this was largely a pilot to see if in an older patient population this would be accessible either by video or telehealth visits and many of the patients really appreciated this opportunity to discuss all of these issues from their own homes in a setting that's kind of divorced from the busyness of a hematology or leukemia clinic and most of the patients found this very meaningful as did their caregivers and this is a project that can I think have great advantage to our patients for the future if we're able to continue these kinds of discussions with them in settings where that's the focus where they are the focus and we don't have to be so worried about you know what chemotherapy they're going to get that day or what treatments are they're undergoing and a second abstract that was along those same lines was actually presented as a poster by Dr. Low and that is looking at how patients prioritize different goals in their care this again was in an older patient population examining you know priorities that patients have whether it's survival avoiding toxicity being able to have a quality of life and what was interesting about this project is that she found that as patients age sometimes with decade to decade between 60 and 70 and 70 to 80 and above 80 priorities of patients do tend to change more toward focus on quality of life avoiding undue toxicities long hospitalizations and those types of things and again this was all conducted through through through surveys that were done as part part of patients overall care plans and I think these kinds of patient communication tools can be utilized so effectively in conjunction with other therapeutic modalities that we have to offer patients the good thing about leukemia now and which is really emphasized I think in a meeting like ash is that there are now so many different options as we become more adept at providing precision care to patients there are a lot of different treatment opportunities and being able to share these decision makings with decisions with our patients is so is so important and I think these abstracts emphasize that and emphasize the communication that we need to have with our patients to come up for the individual patient with the treatment that's going to be best for them.