Association of Community Cancer Centers Honors Ethan Basch, MD, MSc, With Clinical Research Award

Ethan M. Basch, MD, MSc, FASCO

The Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC) 2019 Clinical Research Award was presented to Ethan Basch, MD, MSc, Director, Cancer Outcomes Research Program, and Professor, Hematology and Oncology, UNC, Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. The award was presented during the ACCC 36th National Oncology Conference in Orlando, Florida.

As a medical oncologist and health services researcher, Dr. Basch has focused on developing methods to bring the patient perspective into cancer clinical research and routine care delivery. For over a decade, his group has developed and implemented patient-reported outcomes (PRO) tools and worked closely with public and private agencies to effect policy changes based on their findings.

Dr. Basch’s goal is to conduct research that facilitates rigorous inclusion of PROs in product development, drug labels, and routine care for symptom monitoring. It is his hope that bringing the patient voice into clinical research and care delivery processes will lead to safer drug development, improved quality of care, enhanced patient-clinician communication, and better patient experiences with disease and treatment.

In accepting the award, Dr. Basch shared that his research has found that in routine care about 75 percent of patients are compliant with self-reported outcomes. And in some rural programs, this compliance rate has been as high as 95 percent. “Integration of patient-reported symptoms into cancer care is feasible and is associated with clinical benefit,” he said. He believes that future efforts should focus on strategies for implementing self-reporting into clinical workflow and electronic health records.