Unscheduled Interactions in Outpatient Bispecific Therapy for RRMM | Anna Howard, RN | ASH 2023

I'm Anna. I'm a registered nurse at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the myeloma service. So as some of you may know CAR T cell therapy and bi-specific antibodies therapies are have shown to be really effective as treatment for multiple myeloma patients. But since they are newer treatments that have been more recently FDA approved, there's not as much information on how this kind of affects patients and they're the burden of the treatment on the patient specifically. So to kind of find more out about that we did a retrospective study looking at patients who were treated not on a clinical trial for patients treated with CAR T as well as bi-specific antibodies. And so we looked at those patients. They had to be strong responders which we considered showing a response to therapy for at least four months. And then we only looked at patients as well that were treated specifically at MSK. And we wanted to kind of see what reasons this population are doing what we call unscheduled health care interactions. So that included calls to the physician's office, portal messages, trips to an urgent care, an ER, and then inpatient stays as well. So we can look through the charts of all of these patient populations to see and compare the difference between those on the bi-specific antibodies and the CAR T of why they were having these unscheduled health care interactions. And so through that we found that both these populations do frequently have these unscheduled health care interactions. But we found that most significantly the patients on bi-specific antibodies tended to call more or they did call more than patients on CAR T. And as well as they went to the urgent care more than patients on CAR T. And we found that the reasons for this most prominently was upper respiratory infections in the bi-specific antibody patient population. And but that being said most of these patients even when they were calling or then going to the urgent care or even an emergency room for these for especially the upper respiratory infections they didn't actually get admitted for that. So even though they were having these symptoms it wasn't serious it didn't require an admission. With all that together to especially from a nursing perspective that we can help educate the patients more on what they can expect and how to manage these side effects at home or manage them even without necessarily needing to reach out to the doctor's office or being evaluated in person when they're on these therapies.