V-Learning: Targeting MET with an emphasis on NSCLC

Solange Peters, Lecturer of the new V-learing module on MET

ESMO’s strategic goal is to continually develop on-line educational tools for professionals in the field of Medical Oncology and foster new challenging CME opportunities for ESMO Members

What is ESMO V-Learning?

Recent scientific discoveries in cancer and signalling pathways for which an update of knowledge is needed and for its complete understanding additional video material is beneficialScience in cancer is moving rapidly and to keep in pace with rapid progresses, more complete understanding of molecular biology/pathology, or technological advances is needed. The V-Learning platform is ideal to present such novelties end enhance understanding of clinicians by additional visual components beyond classical slide presentationIt present in more realistic way what’s going on at the cancer cell level and provide in more details the mechanistic aspects involved in different cancer processes

Relatris‘s insight:

The European Society for Medical Oncologists has many great resources for (continued) education. The newest family member are V-Learning lectures: slides and video sections combined (with questionnaires). Video lectures with slides are the format of the widely popular MOOCs, providing a more personal way of teaching than just hearing a voice from the off while seeing some slides. This integration of new trends in education into their continued education lectures is an innovative way of ESMO to further improve their programms.

See on www.esmo.org

Hashtags for oncology conferences July & August

July 3rd: ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer 2013 – #WorldGI

July 18th: 12th International Congress on the Future of Breast Cancer – #ICBC13

July 25th: 14th International Lung Cancer Congress – #LCC14

August 6th: Prostate Cancer World Congress – #pcwc13

 

Power to the patients: Doc appointment and review website Vitals raises $22M

Vitals raises $22 million to add staff, health insurance decision-support tools to doctor appointment and ratings website to satisfy consumer demand for healthcare price transparency

Relatris‘s insight:

Vitals currently serves as a doctors review website and soon will help patients in the US to get through their health insurance journal.

I took the opportunity to check some of the doctors I visited myself in the US for their reviews in Vitalis. To make it short: If you get good reviews, you’r off great, with many stars blinking into the potential patients eyes. But if there is only one or two patients who weren’t happy with you, it looks bad, as the dominating star rating immediately downgrades you.

So how to handle such rating systems that they stay objective? What about just showing star rating after a doctor got e.g. 10 written reviews? What about fine tuning, e.g. separating organizational issues (waiting times) from medical issues?

Doctors rating will come more and more in Europe too, so maybe it’s time to think about a system more elaborate than Amazon-like stars.

See on medcitynews.com

Social Media for Oncologists

Today we discuss the dissemination of research results, clinical trials, and other oncology news using social media, as well as what type of media oncologists use, how useful and relevant this type of information is for most oncologists, and where oncologists can plug into information and communication sources.

We speak with Michael A. Thompson, MD, PhD, who was the medical director of cancer research at ProHealth Care Regional Cancer Center, in Wisconsin, and clinical trials lead investigator of the NCI Community Cancer Centers Program. Dr. Thompson has a blog over on ASCO Connection, a professional networking site for communication within the worldwide oncology community, and he is active on Twitter. You can find his tweets at the Twitter handle, which is the same as a username, @mtmdphd.

Relatris‘s insight:

A very insightful interview with one of the leading onoclogists on Twitter and other social networks. Read it to understand what’s evolving on social media for oncologists and how to get into it.

See on member.ubmmedica.com

OncoAssist becomes latest app to be classified as a medical device

An iPhone and iPad app that offers oncologists a full range of clinical decision support tools has become the latest mobile application to be classified as a medical device.

OncoAssist is designed to save oncologists time by providing quick and easy access to prognostic tools that can help with decisions on risk stratification and clinical trial.

Relatris‘s insight:

OncoAssist seems to be a very interesting app for oncologists, aggregating a bunch of useful tools from certified sources and seeking approval from authorities. Right now only available (and certified) in the UK and Irland, we are looking forward seeing this app in the Swiss app store. For more information: http://oncoassist.com

For a walkthrough:

See on www.pmlive.com

Skin Doctors Question Accuracy Of Apps For Cancer Risk

Smartphone apps that assess moles for skin cancer risk missed threatening moles one-third of the time, say dermatologists who tested some of the apps. The apps could give people a false sense of security about their skin.

Ferris and her colleagues used photos of 188 moles, 60 of which were confirmed as melanoma, to test four find-the-skin-cancer apps: three that do instant in-phone diagnosis, and one that ships the mole mug shots to a real live dermatologist for review.

The dermatologists correctly identified the suspicious moles 98 percent of the time. But the apps that relied on algorithms were much less reliable, missing the melanoma 30 percent of the time.

“One app would pick up a certain melanoma, and it would be missed by another,” Ferris tells Shots. And it wasn’t like they were going out of their way to stump the app. “These are melanomas that I could show to an untrained person and they’d go, ‘That looks bad’“.

Relatris‘s insight:

With pattern recognition known as one of the things humans overrule computers by far, the outcome of this study actually does not suprise too much. But again an example how important it is that apps get reviewed and tested.

See on www.npr.org

Survey: 45 percent of smartphone users want online physician appointment booking

The survey asked how interested the respondents were in communicating with healthcare providers or obtaining diagnostic tests through a smartphone or tablet […]

Some 43 percent of respondents were interested in asking doctors questions, another 45 percent were interested in booking appointments, while 42 percent were interested in checking the effects and side effects of a medicine. While the percentage differences between the age groups didn’t vary much, people over the age of 65 were less interested than other age groups. Of the healthcare services listed, the patients were least interested in getting reminders to participate in programs for exercise, diet, weight loss and other wellness programs.

Relatris‘s insight:

About 30% of respondents of the questionnaire like to interact with their physician online and would approve of tools allowing to do so easily. Unfortunately, the article does not state which percentage of total American adults online those respondents represented. Still, an app supporting patient/physician interactions can definitively improve communication, which is especially important with diseases as complex as cancer, enhancing patients trust in doctors and medications.

See on mobihealthnews.com

Tracking cancer conversations online: The Social Oncology Project 2013

See on Scoop.it – oncoTools

The amount of clinical data available in oncology has increased exponentially over the last several years –the number of cancer-related journal articles posted to PubMed has increased 349% since 1999.  It should be no surprise that the number of cancer-related conversations has exploded in similar fashion. As those cancer-specific conversations continue to grow, it’s important to take a closer look at the physicians who are driving them. That desire to understand physicians’ online activity led to the publication of the MDigitalLife Social Oncology Project 2013.
[…]
Another important learning was that, increasingly, there isn’t just one cancer conversation – there are distinct and recognizable conversations happening now about dozens of different cancer varieties – each with its own participants, preferred channels, media coverage, and physician influencers.  As we looked at physicians who were engaging in cancer conversations, we were pleased to see that not only is their number increasing, but also that their conversations are becoming increasingly more robust and sophisticated.
[…]
But what’s more interesting (and, we believe, valuable) is to know which physicians are discussed most actively by their physician peers.
[…]
And while it would be a mistake to accept the number of peer-mentions as a 1×1 proxy for influence, when physicians cite and engage with each other online, it is a strong indicator that the mentioned physician is either a) consistently engaged in creating and sharing strong, credible content online, and/or b) exceptionally well networked with a peer group that has formed around a specific topic area.
[…]
Separate infographics will be posted this week covering breast cancer, prostate cancer, skin cancer and lung cancer at w.cg/tsop13.

Relatris‘s insight:

Being a KOL in the time of social media, discussing with 140 characters.

So what is discussed? In an older article of KevinMD (http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2012/10/physician-twitter-examining-data.html), we found that paragraph:

What’s more interesting, of course, is the substance of their tweets.  We examined a sample of tweets related to 3 therapeutic areas: diabetes, breast cancer and prostate cancer.
[…]
It was also interesting to note that prostate cancer was as widely discussed as it was … 70% of specialties mentioned it in their tweets.  Much of the volume there was driven by this summer’s controversy about the validity of the PSA test as a means of lowering morbidity;  In fact, 43% of the tweets about prostate cancer between May and September were related to this specific issue.

Relatris will definitively starting to follow what’s going on on Twitter and examine, if it’s a US phenomenon or if there are any European oncologists out there (in this project, only US physicians were included).

See on www.kevinmd.com

New Mobile App Assists Oncologists In Navigating Ever-Evolving Sea Of Cancer Information

Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) announced an exclusive sponsorship of MDLinx, a web property of M3 USA, for a searchable mobile application that provides reviews of the latest oncology-specific journal articles.

The journal aggregator app, called MDLinx Oncology Articles, is available for Google Android® and Apple iPhone® platforms and allows users to access the oncology information that is most important to them wherever they may be. Physician editors at MDLinx rank, sort and summarize oncology articles from more than 150 oncology journals, allowing oncologists to not only choose what journals they want to follow and filter by sub-specialty, but also search articles by key term or tumor type. The content is selected and controlled exclusively by the MDLinx Editorial Team at M3.

Relatris‘s insight:

I downloaded this app about two weeks before its official launch and did a small analysis of the publications chosen by the MDLinx team.

The app has a straight-forward, lean, and appealing design with a sponsor screen quickly showing up while the app is starting and a clear and easy to handle journal search/add.

First, I chose 6 journals (BJC, CCR, EJC, IJC, JCO and Lancet Oncology) in the app and compared the articles in the app stream with the TOCs on the journal website. With the exception of Lancet, all articles were “online first” and showed up in the app randomly distributed from the date of online publication up to one week after.

I then analyzed the percentage of main articles published by 4 of those journals (BJC, CCR, JCO and Lancet) that appear in the app stream within this week for the last couple of issues. The number was 70% to nearly 90%, which still leaves you with a high number of articles in your feed.

Last, I compared the articles in the app with those in MDLinx email newsletter for 5 consecutive days for the journals chosen. On 4 of the 5 days, the app suggested more publications than the newsletter (25-45% more), while only few publications showed up in the newsletter but not in the app. The newsletter therefore provides you with a stringer selection of the published articles.

Taken together, the app is an appealing and handy way to get publications-on-the-go, but to enhance the value of the app (especially compared to other journal aggregator apps), I think even more curation is needed- even when now and then, some important information may get lost.

See on www.prnewswire.com

‘Game changing’ cancer database pushes fight against disease forward

See on Scoop.it – oncoTools

The world’s largest cancer database will be launched in the UK today, in what experts are calling a “game-changing” stride forward in the fight against the disease.

Millions of patient records containing detailed information on individual cancers and how they have been treated will be available to specialists around the country, paving the way for highly personalised treatment of individual patients.

“This is game-changing,” Jem Rashbass, who led the project at Public Health England, told The Times. “This puts us at the forefront of cancer care for the next two decades.”

“In effect every cancer patient has a rare disease that is different in some way from another cancer. This allows us to carry out refined searches to see how other tumours have responded to identify the optimum treatment as early as possible.”

Relatris‘s insight:

Great to have such a database. The big challenge will be to use it meaningfully, so to not only have good search algorithms, but to draw the right conclusions out of the results. Then, this will be a powerful tool!

See on www.independent.co.uk