May 13 2020
Since March 2020, the U.S. has been adopting measures to manage the pandemic spread of COVID-19. NRG Oncology, with every other business in the US, has had to adjust and adopt. Fortunately, we’ve been able to adjust through expansion of our remote work practices, and continue to focus on our research portfolio.
We have heard from many at our member sites that they have “settled in” to their short-term realities. NRG Members continue to accrue patients to trials. For the moment, accrual to NRG trials seems to have evened out at 65-70%of our pre-COVID weekly average.
Many states are seeing a plateau or decline in the number of new COVID-19 patients presenting.State by state, facility by facility, planning has commenced for a return to ‘normal’, with accommodations for a virus that isn’t going away any time soon.
Despite all of this, the reality of cancer has not changed. NRG Oncology’s mission is to find ways to improve the lives of those impacted by cancer. We’ve all heard of or experienced situations made more difficult – delays in procedures, delays in treatment, physicians and other care providers contracting the virus.
We hear stories daily from our NRG Member Sites, or see them on social media. Meetings on video conference sometimes entertain us with snippets of pets or children, or more sobering stories such as Doug Levine, NRG Cancer Prevention and Control Committee Co-Chair advocating on social media for convalescent plasma donation in the wake of his own recent bout with the virus.
Even as sites consider a return to elective surgeries and develop policies for remote workers to return to the office, precautions will continue to be necessary for some time. Telehealth and remote consent have been newly utilized by many Members; we hope to see local and national policies align for continued use of these tools for clinical research - and appropriate payment policies to support these in the clinical setting.
Furloughs, hiring freezes, and other draconian efforts have been instituted in response to the financial impact of the pandemic. CTEP has recognized this and is seeking to assist through payment for shipment of investigational drug to patient’s homes (for CTEP-IND held studies) and some modest efforts to help with continuity of funding for data management. We hope to see continued efforts in this direction.
We welcome your input and feedback on your clinical research activities and how we can best support you. Feel free to reach out to any of us or drop us a line through our Executive Director at stoermerk@nrgoncology.org and let us know how things are going.