July 16 2020
The NRG Oncology Digital Health Symposium is hosted by the Program Co-Chairs, Dr. Adam Dicker of Thomas Jefferson University and Dr. Sanjay Aneja of the Yale School of Medicine. Drs. Dicker and Aneja provided welcoming remarks and introduced the speakers for the Symposium.
The first speaker of this session was Dr. Krishna Gunturu, who is the Program Director and Cancer Survivor Associate Research Director of Clinical Cancer Research at the Lahey Health Cancer Institute as well as an Assistant Professor at Tufts University. Dr. Gunturu presented on “Clinical Trials Digital Engagement in Adaptive Phase”. During her presentation, Dr. Gunturu highlighted the strengths of social media and digital engagement in the oncology community such as access to education, increasing awareness, improving remote monitoring techniques, improving patient-reported outcomes, and crowd sourcing for trial involvement. She mentioned that providing options such as telehealth could decrease the burden of patients and caretakers. In total, all of the different ways physicians can utilize digital engagement tools in the adaptive phase can help accrual to trials, ultimately leading to the successful conduct of the trial. Dr. Gunturu left the audience with the question of how can the oncology research community be doing better?
The second presentation was delivered by Leslie Krumholz, JD, the CEO of Hugo PHR, and Dave Hutten, the Vice President of Production at Hugo PHR. Krumholz and Hutten discussed Hugo, which is transforming data research by connecting people and data. Hugo Health was formed in 2015 and provide patient-centered real world data collection and sharing. Hugo leverages the rights for people to access their health data including health systems, pharmacies, device systems, wearables, and more. Hugo allows people to link all of their data tools to harmonize the data and make it more usable following a person’s consent for data sharing.