BETA - How can a community oncologist work with a myeloma specialist?

Good communication isn't just helpful, it's essential. When your healthcare team is on the same page, it leads to better care, fewer mistakes, and a smoother experience for you as a patient. In this Health Tree University lesson, you'll discover how your community oncologist can work closely with your myeloma specialist to provide you with the best possible care. Learn how strong communication keeps your team connected and keeps you at the center of it all. How can a community oncologist work with a myeloma specialist? Community providers are playing a vital role in our battle against cancer, especially myeloma. Not all patients have access to an academic center. There are times when patients live far away, they don't want to take time off work, they want to stay close, get therapy locally at home, and that is the time when a community oncologist comes into play. I do think community oncologists and myeloma specialists with hand in glove that the very first time a patient gets diagnosed, they can get started on treatment, but to get a guidance on how the treatment should evolve as time goes on, whether the patient should have a transplant or not, whether she should go through maintenance, and what kind of treatments they should receive upon relapse of myeloma. A lot of the conversation is guided by the myeloma specialist and can be executed by the community provider out there in the community. So it's a very important close relationship, and I think if we want to offer the best possible care for our myeloma patients, it has to be a close collaboration between the two. Especially nowadays when patients are receiving treatments like CAR-T, they're getting bispecific antibodies, which can be a lifelong treatment, or need very close observations after starting treatment, it's even more important that we have a strong close collaboration with our community providers who can offer these therapies to patients at home. I like to actually have interaction that's in the form of a dialogue, a discussion with my referring providers in the community. So I usually pick up the phone and call my referring providers, or oftentimes my friends in the community, and discuss the patient case in detail. But there can be several other ways that you can communicate with them. Now we have electronic medical system that is so well connected that whatever assessment I provide to the patient, as long as I am documenting it in the EMR, it can be actually looked at by the referring provider. We transfer all of our notes to our referring providers along with patient labs, and then you know, I personally prefer still to give them a phone call, let them know if the patient is doing really well, or if they need to change treatments. And every now and then we have seminars and conferences like HealthFree Foundation has been supporting over the years, where we all meet and talk about myeloma and new treatments. Absolutely, I would prefer that if a community provider needs an opinion, where the patient may not be able to come and see us right away, they call me and we discuss the case over the phone. You know, it's actually a very important integral part of myeloma care that we are offering, especially with all the scientific advances that we are seeing that we are able to relay a lot of new information, novel therapies, and be able to explain them to our community providers is one of the most enjoyable aspects of myeloma care. I certainly have had situations like this where perhaps one of the recommendations or treatment that I have proposed may not be agreed upon by the provider. And I think differences like this are best resolved by having conversation, discussion, and often times you find solutions when you actually think out loud. Most importantly, you have to take into consideration what the patient preference remains. If the patient is strongly aligned with one of the opinions, whether that's coming from a myeloma specialist or if that's a community provider, I think at the end of the day we have to really honor what's medically safe and medically desired by the patient. What are some questions a patient should ask when they need to make a decision on which way to proceed if there is a disagreement? I think that's important again as we discuss different aspects of myeloma care, whether that's change of treatment, new treatment, stopping treatment, what is the underlying rationale behind a particular recommendation, what are the alternatives, what are some of the positive things that can happen with a particular change, let's say change of chemotherapy, and what can actually go wrong. How is a particular treatment or change of therapy or a change of approach going to affect the patient experience, the quality of life? I think there's some of the important questions that patients should be asking their myeloma provider specialist as well as the community oncologist. Community oncologist can and should work with a myeloma specialist. No community oncologist should be expected to understand, know all the vicissitudes of myeloma. It is just far too unusual of a cancer for a community oncologist who doesn't see that cancer very often. A community oncologist can give you your labs, they can do your drugs for you, they can administer them, but they need to do that with the help and actually I'd say the authority of the myeloma specialist. I would sort of equate it to say that the myeloma specialist is the captain of your ship, but remember you are the admiral of the fleet. It's your cancer, you make the final decision. Your specialist is your advisor, your community doctor is your advisor, but you, the myeloma patient, are the one who makes the final decision. clinical trials and side effect solution.