Dr. Joseph McCollom and Dr. Ramy Sedhom discuss precision palliative care, a new strategy that aims to align palliative care delivery with patient and caregiver needs instead of diagnosis alone.

TRANSCRIPT

ADN Podcast Episode 8-22

Transcript: What Is Precision Palliative Care? Rethinking a Care Delivery Problem

Dr. Joseph McCollom: Hello and welcome to the ASCO Daily News Podcast. I'm your guest host, Dr. Joseph McCollom. I'm a GI medical oncologist and palliative oncologist at the Parkview Packnett Family Cancer Institute here in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

So, the early benefits of palliative care for patients with cancer have been well documented, but there are challenges in terms of bandwidth to how do we provide this care, given the workforce shortages in the oncology field. So today, we'll be exploring a new opportunity known as precision palliative care, a strategy that aims to align care delivery with patient and caregiver needs and not just diagnosis alone.

Joining me for this discussion is Dr. Ramy Sedhom. He is the medical director of oncology and palliative care at Penn Medicine Princeton Health and a clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

Our full disclosures are available in the transcript of this episode. 

Dr. Sedhom, it's great to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Ramy Sedhom: Thank you, Joe. It's a pleasure to be here and lucky me to be in conversation with a colleague and friend. Yes, many of us have heard about the benefits of early palliative care. Trials have shown better quality of life, reduced symptoms, and potentially even improved survival. But as we know, the reality is translating that evidence into practice, which is really, really challenging. So Joe, both you and I know that not every patient can see palliative care, or I'd even argue should see palliative care, but that also means there are still many people with real needs who still fall through the cracks. That's why I'm really excited about today's topic, which we'll be discussing, which is precision palliative care. It's a growing shift in mindset from what's this patient's diagnosis or what's this patient's prognosis, to what matters most for this person in front of me right now and what are their individual care needs. I think, Joe, it's very exciting because the field is moving from a blanket approach to one tailored to meet people where they actually are.

Dr. Joseph McCollom: Absolutely, Ramy. And I think from the early days when palliative care was kind of being introduced and trying to distinguish itself, I think one of the first models that came to clinicians' eyes was Jennifer Temel's paper in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2010. And her colleagues had really looked at early palliative care integration for patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer. And in that era – this is a pre-immunotherapy era, very early targeted therapy era – the overall prognosis for those patients are similar to the population I serve as a GI medical oncologist, pancreatic cancer today. Typically, median overall survival of a year or less. And so, a lot of her colleagues really wanted her to track overall survival alongside quality of life and depression scores as a result of that. And it really was a landmark publication because not only did it show an improvement of quality of life, but it actually showed an improvement of overall survival. And that was really, I think, revolutionary at the time. You know, a lot of folks had talked about if this was a drug, the FDA would approve it. We all in GI oncology laugh about erlotinib, which got an FDA approval for a 2-week overall survival advantage. And so, it really kind of set the stage for a lot of us in early career who had a passion in the integration of palliative care and oncology.

And I think a lot of the subsequent ASCO, NCCN, COC, Commission on Cancer, guidelines followed through with that. But I think what we realized is now we're kind of sitting center stage, there's still a lot of resource issues that if we sent a referral to palliative care for every single patient diagnosed with even an advanced cancer, we would have a significant workforce shortage issue. And so, Ramy, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how do we help center in on who are the right patients that are going to have the greatest benefit from a palliative care specialist intervention?

Dr. Ramy Sedhom: Thanks, Joe. Great question. So you mentioned Dr. Temel's landmark 2010 trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine. And it is still a game changer in our field. The results of her work showed not only improved quality of life and mood, but I think very surprisingly at the time, a survival benefit for patients with lung cancer who had received early palliative care. That work, of course, has helped shape national guidelines, as you've shared, and it also helped define early, as within 8 weeks of diagnosis. But unfortunately, there remains a disconnect. So in clinical practice, using diagnosis or stage as the only referral trigger doesn't really match the needs that we see show up.

And I think unfortunately, the other part is that approach creates a supply demand mismatch. We end up either referring more patients than palliative care teams can handle, or at the opposite extreme, we end up referring no one at all. So, I actually just wanted to quickly give, for example, two real world contrasts. So one center that I actually have friends who work in, tried as a very good quality improvement incentive, auto-refer all patients with stage IV pancreas cancer to palliative care teams. And while very well intentioned, they saw very quickly that in a two-month period, they had 30 new referrals. And on the palliative care side, there were only 15 available new patient slots. On the other hand, something that I often see in practice, is a situation where, for example, consider the case of a 90-year-old with a low-grade B-cell lymphoma. On paper, low-risk disease, but unfortunately, when you look under the microscope, this gentleman is isolated, has symptoms from his bulky adenopathy, and feels very overwhelmed by many competing illnesses. This is someone who, of course, may benefit from palliative care, but probably doesn't check the box. And I think this is where the model of precision palliative care steps in. It's not really about when was someone diagnosed or what is the prognosis or time-based criteria of their cancer, but it's really fundamentally asking the question of who needs help, what kind of help do they need, and how urgently do we need to provide this help?

And I think precision palliative care really mirrors the logic and the philosophy of precision oncology. So just like we've made strides trying to match therapies to tumor biology, we also need to have the same attention and the same precision to match support to symptoms, to context of a patient situation and their caregiver, and also to their personal goals. So I think instead of a blanket referral, we really need to tailor care, the right support at the right moment for the right person to the right care teams. And I think to be more precise, there's really four core elements to allow us to do this well. So first, we really need to implement systematic screening. Let's use what we already have. Many of our centers have patient reported outcomes.

The Commission on Cancer motivates us to use distress screening tools. And the EHR is there, but we do very little to flag and to surface unmet care needs. We have seen amazing work from people like Dr. Ethan Bash, who is the pioneer on patient-reported outcomes, and Dr. Ravi Parikh, who used to be my colleague at Penn, now at Emory, who show that you could use structured data and machine learning to identify some of these patient needs in real time. The second piece