Dr. Chino welcomes Dr. Vivek Patel and Dr. Eleonora Teplinsky to discuss a recent article in JCO OP that reported a podcast-based curriculum could improve knowledge and comfort with common education topics for oncology fellows.

TRANSCRIPT

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

There are over 450 million podcasts available today, and online audio consumption continues to rise year after year. In the US alone, over 200 million people have listened to online audio in the last month, and health and fitness remains one of the most popular categories. Podcast audiences range from the lay public to patients with cancer to providers, with the dual goal to both entertain and inform. A recent randomized control trial published in JCO OP reported that a podcast-based curriculum could improve knowledge and comfort with common education topics for oncology fellows.

I am happy to welcome two guests today to discuss the role of podcasts to improve information sharing. They are both podcast hosts, making this ASCO's first podcast about podcasts.

Dr. Vivek Patel, MD, is an assistant professor and APD at Vanderbilt University with a treatment focus on blood cancers. He co-founded the Fellow on Call podcast in 2021 to fill a perceived gap in high quality, free, online medical education content in Hem-Onc. The podcast provides the fundamentals, core concepts, and important management approaches in an easily accessible, asynchronous learning platform. He is the first author of the JCO OP manuscript, "Education Impact of a Podcast Curriculum for Hematology-Oncology Fellows," which was simultaneously published with his oral presentation at the 2025 ASCO Annual Meeting.

Dr. Eleonora Teplinsky, MD, FASCO, is the Head of Breast and Gynecological Medical Oncology at Valley Health System and a clinical assistant professor at Mount Sinai. She is the host of the Interlude podcast, founded in 2018 with the goal to promote support, inspiration, knowledge, and hope to listeners via patient and provider interviews. She is also active on social media, providing real time expert commentary on active new stories from emerging research to celebrity diagnosis and treatment.

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

Vivek and Eleonora, it's so wonderful to speak to you.

Dr. Eleonora Teplinsky: Thanks for having us.

Dr. Vivek Patel: Glad to be here.

Dr. Fumiko Chino: Our specific topic today is podcasts as an avenue for knowledge transfer for both patients and providers. This conversation is loosely based on a manuscript that Vivek and team published on the findings of a randomized control trial of an education intervention.

Vivek, do you mind sharing with us how you got interested in podcasting and then briefly discussing what your study team did and the findings?

Dr. Vivek Patel: Yeah, yeah. So getting interested in podcasting really started when I finished residency and was starting Hem-Onc fellowship. There is a popular podcast, The Curbsiders, and I always listened to it when I was a resident to learn core concepts in internal medicine. When I got to Hem-Onc fellowship, there was a gap. And after my first year of fellowship, I met with a couple of my co-fellows and we just decided, "Hey, let's just make a podcast. Maybe it will just be for our program." It ended up being this bigger thing that we created with The Fellow on Call. So that that is really what the start of the journey was, was just, "Hey, there is nothing here. Let us just do something for fun," and then it just kind of took off from there.

For the study that we did though, what we really focused on was, there's been so many studies out there now that have looked at using podcasts and that people like them, people enjoy them, that they are convenient. But there are very few studies looking at, does podcast actually improve knowledge? And that is a very difficult thing to study. You know, it is really hard to do education research in general, particularly in the multi-center setting.

What we did was we designed a multi-center cluster randomized trial where we included 27 hematology-oncology fellowship programs and we randomized the programs to a supplementary curriculum in addition to the standard didactics with our podcast and another podcast that we work closely with, The Two Onc Docs, versus just standard curriculum alone, with a goal of understanding does fellow comfort level in a select set of topics improve and does their knowledge assessment in those topics improve as well? So we actually created and validated a knowledge test as well. We decided not to use the in-training exams because, you know, we figured, well look, these in-training exams cover a broad range of topics. We are really focused on our very key principles in a few disease areas. And the bottom line results were, it was a positive study. We found that the knowledge test scores improved by 15.5% favoring the podcast arms and fellows at the end of the year felt more comfortable in the disease topics that we had given them. So it was interesting to see that the podcast actually improved both comfort and knowledge in the set of topics that we had chosen.

Dr. Fumiko Chino: I love this type of pragmatic, cluster randomized trial which asks a really discreet but also important question, which is how can we be improving education? And also, I think making it more accessible, right? And that is one thing I think your podcast does amazingly, is that you really go into depth on these topics which are quite complex, and I think is useful not just for trainees, but also even practicing physicians that kind of want to bone up on these topics.

Now, The Fellow on Call podcast is a provider-facing podcast. It really focuses on education for trainees and the practicing pro