Telemedicine & Virtual Navigation

When diagnosed with cancer, the typical patient responds with trepidation, anxiety, and fear. This experience engenders a bewildering set of questions, including the cause, treatment options, prognosis, appropriate sources of care, and affordability. Of paramount importance is ready access to expert resources with the requisite knowledge and skill. Telemedicine is a modality of care that addresses all these issues.

In the current oncology clinical trials landscape, many barriers remain to clinical trial enrollment that affect both the oncologist and the patient. Among these are trial locations, strict eligibility requirements, insufficient resources to support appropriate clinical trial education and screening, as well as patient and provider attitudes about trials.

As a genitourinary medical oncologist specializing in immunotherapy for kidney and bladder cancers, I am continually striving for more ways to connect with and learn from my patients. The emerging availability of immuno-oncology (IO) drugs for the conditions I treat, as well as many other cancer types, has generated tremendous excitement amongst patients and oncologists, but there still is so much we don’t know.