GU Cancers 2021 | Disparities in cancer care during COVID-19
Andrew Schmidt, MD, B.Pharm, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, discusses the results of the COVID-19 and Cancer Outcomes Study (CCOS) investigating disparities in cancer care during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study observed a significant decrease in the number of outpatient visits and an increase in telehealth visits. Patients who were African-American or Hispanic were less likely to have increased telehealth visits and were more likely to contract COVID-19 when compared to patients who were Caucasian. This interview took place during the 2021 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium.
Transcript (edited for clarity)
This is a large collaborative study between the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, and it involves a two and a half thousand patient cohort, which we’ve been following since the onset of the pandemic in New England and New York, which was in March of this year.
What we did is we prospectively followed these patients, and what we reported on here is at three months into the pandemic, what we’d seen in terms of multidisciplinary cancer care disruption...
This is a large collaborative study between the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, and it involves a two and a half thousand patient cohort, which we’ve been following since the onset of the pandemic in New England and New York, which was in March of this year.
What we did is we prospectively followed these patients, and what we reported on here is at three months into the pandemic, what we’d seen in terms of multidisciplinary cancer care disruption. So we were looking at how patients’ interaction with the health care interface had changed.
What we found is that, not surprisingly, patients were utilizing more telehealth, and this is well-documented now during the early part of the pandemic. We found that interestingly, there seemed to be a difference in the racial groups that were utilizing telehealth more. What we found was that patients from minorities were less likely to have an uptake in telehealth visits.
We’re unable to comment on what the reasons behind this might be, but it was certainly an interesting finding, and it’s been documented before that perhaps people from minority groups, for a variety of reasons, perhaps less access to either technology or less familiarity with it, had been less likely to use measures which might be able to mitigate the risk of COVID-19. Because, of course, having a telehealth conversation reduces the physical contact with the health care interface.
So what we’re doing now is we’re continuing to follow that cohort and trying to identify what the risk factors might be for patients developing COVID-19 over time, and to see whether the disruption in how patients are utilizing care, for instance, telehealth, has changed during the pandemic.
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