Happy Lung Cancer Awareness Month 2015!

As #LCAM15 begins, LCSM is thinking about what actions the lung cancer community should take to improve quality of life and treatment outcomes for lung cancer patients. What would be the best way to “move the needle” on lung cancer?

If you could choose the top issues that LCSM stakeholders (patients, caregivers, healthcare providers, researchers, advocates, funders, regulators, and healthcare payers) need to address for lung cancer, what would you choose?

• Improve LC awareness and dispel stigma
  • Train patients and caregivers to share stories
  • Publicize patient faces and stories
  • Increase media coverage

• Improve patient care experience
  • Educate patients, healthcare providers, and public on how to be engaged/enabled/empowered patients
    • Educate patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers about networking in patient communities
    • Train patients and caregivers to ask necessary questions
  • Educate healthcare providers about the power of engaged/enabled/empowered patients
  • Promote shared decision making
    • Encourage healthcare providers to elicit and honor patient values and preferences
    • Develop patient decision aids for treatment options
    • Support healthcare provider training on shared decision making
  • Offer appropriate survivorship care supports
  • Provide early palliative care

• Increase availability of new, effective treatments
  • Negotiate affordable drugs costs
  • Support payment models that ensure all patients receive best possible care regardless of location or resources
  • Optimize research study design
    • Bring more patient voices into clinical trial design
    • Facilitate collaborative IRBs and central biobanking
  • Increase speed of regulatory approvals and access
    • For treatments
    • For genomic and molecular biomarkers testing
    • For devices
  • Fund clinical research to validate treatments
  • Increase high value preclinical research
    • Increase availability of research funding
    • Make more tumor tissue and biospecimens available to researchers
    • Increase open access and data sharing of results
    • Increase clinical trial accrual
      • Educate patients and public about clinical trials
      • Assist patients in finding clinical trials
      • Assist patients with travel to trials

• Improve access to quality care
  • Promote remote or in-person second opinions
  • Increase awareness of staging and treatment guidelines
  • Increase availability and knowledge of molecular testing and targeted therapy
  • Increase knowledge of immunotherapies
  • Improve provider access to multidisciplinary teams and expert consults
  • Standardize staging investigations
    • Standardize surgical metrics (eg, number of lymphnode stations sampled)
    • Increase access to minimally invasive surgical techniques (eg, VATS)

• Improve lung cancer screening
  • Provide access to low cost lung cancer screening
  • Educate public about lung cancer screening
  • Research LDCT screening criteria beyond NLST
  • Explore other early detection technologies

• Address risk factors
  • Increase research into risk factors
  • Reduce environmental exposure to carcinogens
  • Reduce behavioral exposure to carcinogens

• Something else not mentioned?

In the #LCSM Chat on November 5 (8 PM ET, 5 PM PT), moderator Janet Freeman-Daily will lead our discussion of this topic using the following four questions.

• T1 What issues are causing the greatest barriers to improving quality of life and outcomes for patients who have lung cancer?
• T2 What actions would have the greatest impact in resolving these issues?
• T3. What stakeholders would you like to see involved in tackling each issue? Which one(s) should take the lead?
• T4 What steps will YOU take as an LCSM stakeholder to help move the needle on lung cancer QOL and outcomes?

For a primer on how to join #LCSM chat, check out How to Participate in LCSM Chat.