Examining the Importance of the Institutional Perspectives in Cancer Webinars

Jason Porter, MD, Janakiraman Subramanian, MD, Natalie S. Calendar, MD, Parameswaran Hari, MD, MRCP, and Kevin Kalinsky, MD, MS, discuss the importance of the Institutional Perspectives in Cancer (IPC) webinars.

The IPC webinars allow oncologists to review and present large sets of data to their peers who may not be able to attend meetings or who have a specific focus in a particular tumor type, Porter, a oncologist/hematologist, and director, Lung Cancer disease research group, West Cancer Center and Research Institute, says. These programs allow attendees to consume and digest data easily and take what they learned back to their clinical practice, Porter notes. 

According to Subramanian, a medical oncologist and director of Thoracic Oncology, Center for Precision Medicine, at Saint Luke’s Cancer Institute, many colleagues have shared about how useful they found these webinars to be. Additionally, attendees who were not oncologists, such as surgeons or pulmonologists, expressed excitement in how the field of oncology has advanced in recent years, Janakiraman explains.

As so many advances have been made across multiple tumor types, these webinars serve as a way to help consolidate and distill information in a useful way, Callander, a professor of medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center, adds.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that it is possible to utilize technology to deliver short, precise information to a wide audience, Hari, the Armand J. Quick/William F. Stapp Professor of Hematology, and the chief of the Division of Hematology/Oncology, Department of Medicine, at the Medical College of Wisconsin, notes. For those oncologists who typically focus on just 1 tumor type, it is important that those experiences get shared with as many healthcare providers as possible to extend benefits to patients, Hari explains. 

Despite the pandemic, it is important for healthcare providers to be able to come together to discuss data and recent findings, Kalinsky, director of the Glenn Family Breast Center and Breast Medical Oncology at Winship Cancer Institute, and acting associate professor in the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Emory University School of Medicine, concludes.