Saved Time Saves Lives: The Impact of Rapid Turnaround Time for Cancer Patients

Science with a Twist

⚡The most critical part is to shorten the time between doing the test and getting the results. From there, doctors will be better positioned to provide the best care to the patient. ''There's always pressure from the patient, the family, and the physician to start therapy as soon as possible. [...] So getting that test earlier allows us to do the right thing for the patients, improve their outcomes, and frankly, reduce costs.

⚡Staying up to date with changes is the most noticeable obstacle to providing targeted therapy. We expect medicine and science to advance, resulting in better solutions in healthcare. But sometimes, patients don't feel comfortable exposing themselves to new approaches, such as targeted treatments. However, Dr. Scott thinks differently. ''I don't think that patients would be the barrier because patients want the best therapy with the least toxicity. The barrier is rapid advance. I've been in oncology for a long time, and I think that relying upon what we learned in medical school, what we did in residency and fellowship, and during our training when things are changing so quickly, it becomes more difficult to stay ahead and to stay up to date. Most oncologists in the community are generalists, and those are the typical oncologists I work with. So we've brought tools and programs to help them so that whether it's AI tomorrow in their EMR — their medical record tool — or programs today, we wanna drive awareness and appropriate utilization.''

⚡The good news is that we already have tools that ensure efficiency. They result from science and tech companies' continuous and joint efforts. ''Historically, I would have a patient with lung cancer, and I would have to call up the pathology lab at my hospital — because I don't make that diagnosis in my office — and I'd have to ask them to send tissue or blocks via FedEx or UPS to a third party. So there's travel time. Then it would take two or three weeks for that third-party lab to do the analysis. And then, I would get back a report, and typically it'd be 26 to 29 days from that asking to have the test submitted. Now we have companies doing what's called a liquid biopsy or using liquid specimen blood where they can do a very similar analysis. [...] It can be as soon as eight days. So that's one event. The other advance, which is even more exciting, is the ability of clinics or hospitals to put the type of equipment we call next-gen sequencing testing tools into their practice. And if you do that, you eliminate the shipping time there and back, and theoretically, you could get results in three to five days.''