Multidisciplinary Care is ‘Incredibly Important’ for Managing GI Cancers

When prompted on the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration when treating patients with gastrointestinal (GI) cancers, Valerie Lee, MD, described working with her colleagues as “wonderful”.

The initial example she referenced was treating patients with rectal cancer, as it often requires an approach with radiation and surgery. Thus, GI doctors and radiologists have to collaborate, often directing decision-making and helping with general treatment proceedings.

Lee, an assistant professor of Oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a medical oncologist at Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Sibley Memorial Hospital, also spoke about the importance of having dietitians, nurses, and a pharmacy group to help with more specialized aspects of care.

Transcript:

I was just talking with one of my colleagues about how it’s wonderful to be at an institution where I fully trust and really love working with all my colleagues. [There] is a need to make sure that everybody is coming in and bringing their expertise together. The best example is probably rectal cancer, which from a standard perspective usually requires chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. [It] also requires our GI doctors and our radiologists to give us directed decision-making on that original testing and on figuring out what the staging is and how we proceed for there, as well as the predisposing factors.

You always discuss, in a multidisciplinary team, what the overall strategy is, and we hand off our patients between different groups over time. That requires a huge amount of support. From our dietitians, our nurses navigating through this process, and our pharmacy group identifying people’s ability to respond, that is incredibly important for us, and that’s just one of the examples.

For pancreas cancer, we have to do the same thing, [and the same applies to] stomach cancer. In a lot of these earlier-stage cancers, our goal is to go and cure these patients, but it can be a really long process; [sometimes] 9 months to 12 months over time. We are hopeful that we can go and help provide expert care in all those areas.