Costs & Financial Hardship Among BMT CTN 1102 Patients MDS | Christopher Su, MD | ASH 2023

Hi, my name is Dr. Christopher Su. I'm a hematologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. At this ash, I presented an abstract looking at this big multi-center trial conducted across the United States where we enrolled a lot of MDS patients who have high-risk disease. We looked at the differences between sending these patients to get a transplant versus doing non-transplant treatments such as hypomethylating agents. And specifically for the abstract, we wanted to look at the amount of cost that the patient had to pay out of pocket during the treatment process. So the primary trial showed that individuals who got transplanted for their high-risk MDS did better overall compared to the patients that didn't get transplants. However, these patients who underwent transplant also had to pay a lot of out-of-pocket expenses for things like going to the doctor, their prescription medications, their transportation, their lodging. And so all of these costs added up. And it can be actually quite impressive. One of the figures from our study was more than one year after transplant, among the MDS patients that went on to get a transplant, patients were still paying about $5,000 out-of-pocket to afford these expenses to follow up on their transplant care. So this research is really to just show awareness of the really high cost that patients still have to pay out-of-pocket for when they get a treatment like transplant, which seems to be a treatment that kind of is definitive. There's still a lot of follow-up period after that with a lot of costs associated with it. So we recommend that as a result of this research, that if you are a patient who has a lot of significant out-of-pocket costs, please let your social worker know, let the financial navigators at your cancer center know, and also reach out to patient advocacy or disease foundations who might be able to help you apply for some grants that can help you with these out-of-pocket costs, or they might just have resources to help you with these out-of-pocket costs. Because we think that even though ultimately the disease outcome is really important, no individual should go into bankruptcy or to be in dire financial straits because of their disease and their treatment. So thank you. That is the abstract that we presented at this ash. Thank you.