Trial of an Education Video for CAR T-cell Therapy Recipients

My name is Patrick Conner-Johnson. I'm from the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. I specialize in the treatment of lymphoma and those receiving cellular therapies, such as CAR T-cell therapy. We're presenting work at this conference examining how we educate patients about CAR T-cell therapy before receiving this treatment. Currently, the standard is to do a consult visit where we do a typical description of CAR T-cells for patients. In other areas of medicine, it's been found that this is inadequate for conveying healthcare information in the best way. For example, there have been studies looking at videos to try and improve how patients and their families understand the information we're conveying in a healthcare setting. Because of this, we sought to develop a video and assess its impact on patient care. The video is a 12-minute video that summarizes several topics in CAR T-cells, how CAR T-cell therapy works, the logistics with examples and images of the different aspects of the logistics, what the side effects are and how those might be managed, and what some of the expectations might be about how their response will be assessed, as well as coping with the uncertainty of dealing with while awaiting for the response. We then took this video after it was made and tested it in what we call a randomized controlled trial, meaning half of the patients got the video plus usual care and the other half got usual care. And then we examined the primary point of this study was to say, is it feasible? In other words, will patients be interested in watching the video? And then number two, is the video acceptable to patients? What do patients think about the video? We then did what we call some preliminary analysis of how the video impacts patient reported outcomes. The study, which had 80 patients in it, was very feasible with 79% of patients enrolling in the study. That met the endpoint for feasibility, meaning that this was something that patients were willing to watch. Over 90% of patients considered the video acceptable, by which we mean when we asked them a question, what do you think about the video, the vast majority of these patients felt the video was acceptable to them, and 94% of them would recommend it to other patients in a similar clinical scenario. We saw some preliminary early signal showing improvements in self-efficacy and decision satisfaction for patients receiving the video versus patients receiving standard usual care. And so we're taking these findings together and saying, it's still early. We want to do a second study with a larger number of patients to really definitively understand the impact of the video on patient care. But what you can say is that it's encouraging. It appears feasible, it appears acceptable to patients, and there's some promising signal that it improves patient reported outcomes. In the future, we hope to do a larger study, improve that, and hopefully change the way care is delivered for patients receiving CAR T cells.