Germline genetic testing can play an essential role in identifying cancer risk, guiding treatment decisions, and informing screening and/or preventive strategies for both patients and patient family members. Access to timely and convenient genetic testing can be challenging based on increased indications for testing, larger gene panels, and high numbers of positive tests which are overloading a limited genetics workforce. This is leading to long wait times and widening disparities in access to genetic testing. Dr. Chino welcomes Dr. Trevor Hoffman to discuss an intervention he helped pilot using non-genetics providers to increase access while maintaining quality.

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Fumiko Chino: Hello and welcome to Put Into Practice, the podcast from the JCO Oncology Practice. I'm Dr. Fumiko Chino, an assistant professor in radiation oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center with a research focus on access, affordability, and equity.

Germline genetic testing can play an essential role to identify cancer risk, guide treatment directions, and inform screening or preventative strategies for both patients and patient family members. Access to timely and convenient genetic testing can be challenging based on increased indications for testing, larger gene panels, and high numbers of positive tests that are overloading a limited genetics workforce. This is leading to long wait times and widening disparities in access to genetic testing. I'm happy to welcome a guest today to discuss an intervention he helped pilot using non-genetics providers to increase access while maintaining quality.

Dr. Trevor Hoffman, MD, PhD, is an associate professor in clinical medicine at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine and the Regional Chief of Medical Genetics in the Southern California Kaiser Permanente Medical Group. He leads a department of 10 medical geneticists and approximately 40 genetic counselors, serving 5 million Kaiser members in Southern California. He is the first author of a JCO OP manuscript, "Expanding Germline Hereditary Cancer Gene Panel Testing by Non-Genetics Providers," which was published earlier this year.

Our full disclosures are available in the transcript of this episode, and we've already agreed to go by our first names for the podcast today.

Trevor, it's wonderful to speak to you today.

Dr. Trevor Hoffman: Thank you so much for inviting me on the pod. I'm really psyched about it.

Dr. Fumiko Chino: Our specific topic today is something that I know you know a lot about, germline genetic testing. Despite broadened eligibility, only a small percentage of people diagnosed with cancer will undergo germline genetic testing, and I'd love your thoughts on the changes in genetic testing over your 20+ year career, and particularly, obviously for our respects, within the cancer patient population. The who, what, when, where, how, and wherefores of genetic testing and how this has evolved as our scientific knowledge has really improved over time.

Dr. Trevor Hoffman: Yeah, it's been a wild ride considering everything I've seen happen in my own field. Back when I started in practice, we were doing like standard karyotypes and maybe sequencing a gene here or there by Sanger sequencing, and testing was cost prohibitive, thousands of dollars. You know, there were gene patents. You know, we were this little hidden department, like in the basement, that hardly anybody knew about, and we liked our little place in anonymity, and it was all good.

Come the genomics revolution and next-generation sequencing, and, you know, all of a sudden you can, in one machine, sequence, you know, billions of letters of genetic code for hundreds of dollars. It was like a paradigm shift caused by technology. So that and the removal of gene patents, we've come, you know, in the ensuing years to hereditary cancer gene tests that's, you name it, depending on whether it's done 20, 30, 40, 70 genes for under $500 in most cases and can be done in a matter of a couple of weeks. That's a bit of a massive change.

In oncology, we've seen that happen in terms of tumor NGS, right? Like, things are changing for all of us rapidly. And so multiply that across every specialty. In my field where we used to own every genetic test, like genetics would kind of order every test and determine who needed testing, that's not going to happen. Like, it's not going to work anymore. So we have to come up with better ways to sort of put it into the hands of people, make it easy, make it appropriate to maintain access. We can't do the white-glove service anymore where we see every single patient and touch every patient.

That's the shortest version of my career in a nutshell. And you're living this too, right? Like many people listening to this podcast train oncology, like tumor NGS didn't exist, you know, and now all of a sudden it's like standard of care in our system. And you know, people have had to just learn by the seat of their pants. And so we're all in this crazy roller coaster together.

Dr. Fumiko Chino: Yeah, it seems like the proliferation of testing and the vitality of the information gained from it, how important it is, it is unsustainable for the genetics workforce to stay in their closed basement system. As a radiation oncologist who lives in a basement, we have enough people in the basement. We're hoping to integrate them a little better into the larger community.

Now, you were the first author of this recent report on the 3-year experience of mainstreaming hereditary cancer gene panel testing at Kaiser Permanente Southern California. Do you mind briefly discussing the background of what led to this project - again, sounds like limited workforce - and what your study team actually did, and then the actual findings?

Dr. Trevor Hoffman: Yeah, I'd love to. So this kind of arose from, and mainstreaming is essentially in the genetics field, we call that like handing a test to a non-genetics provider to order. So that's kind of the term that has been applied to that. And essentially, we have to do that. And so this kind of arose through some personal relationships I had with cancer providers in our system, a couple of whom were down the hall from me. One of them was a GYN ONC provider, and the other was a breast surgeon. And so, I had both our breast surgeon and our GYN ONC doc approached me and say, "You know what? I'm seeing all these women and they have ovarian cancer, or they have breast cancer, and I know I'm doing surgery on these people. They need a hereditary cancer gene test. It's a no-brainer. And so I have to see them. I schedule my surgery. If it's breast cancer, I'm like, I'm not sure what the surgery is, and this woman may be 45, and it's like, well, I don't know what surgery to do, but we schedule a surgery in three weeks. We refer t