Navigating the uncertainties, disruptions, and devastation associated with COVID-19 has required a level of resilience, determination, and continued commitment to delivering state-of-the-art cancer care. Despite these challenges, the tempo of scientific innovation remains robust, requiring continued integration of new science and shifting standards of care. While we all accept the continuous learning inherent in hematology and oncology, accessing, assimilating, and applying new knowledge to practice takes time, commitment, repetition, and access to varied resources for learning.
There is a certain amount of learning that happens every day in practice, including tumor boards, team collaboration during the delivery of care, grand rounds, and review of standards or literature. Yet, most of us long to interact with other clinicians at national or regional meetings where we can hear experts impart results of their work and important clinical pearls. Most of the usual strategies for learning were challenged this year. We shifted to virtual meetings and conferences, distanced workrooms, limitation of caregivers in the clinic, and increased telehealth. Continuous masking and wearing eye protection became essential but significantly changed communication. Many of the practices we have adopted during this pandemic will remain a part of our practice and our learning models moving forward.
In that spirit, we bring you some highlights from the 62nd American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting and Exposition. An important skill for all clinicians, including the advanced practitioner, is the ability to review abstracts online either before a meeting to set your individual schedule, or after a meeting to catch the things you may have missed. A recent publication in the Journal of the Advanced Practitioner in Oncology provides guidelines for interpretation of clinical trials data (Kurtin & Taher, 2020).
You do not need to be a proficient clinical researcher to quickly scan an abstract, determine the general level of evidence, and extract key points that may either change your practice or alert you to keep an eye on a new treatment or clinical strategy. You will find that you begin to recognize authors that publish work in an area of interest to you. You can then search for other works from that author in PubMed or other literature search tools.
Selection of this year’s abstracts is focused on a broad scope of topics considered to have findings that are likely to require a change in advanced practice. New therapeutic targets, new routes of administration, combining agents with novel mechanisms of action, setting new standards for risk stratification and definitions of response, and continually reviewing data as it matures are reflected in the abstracts presented in this supplement. Each of the authors will share their summation of the abstract, including the implications for advanced practice. You can also watch each author discuss these abstracts at advancedpractitioner.com/highlights.