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Liver tumor program launched to ‘work in a fashion of teamwork’
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The Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health launched a new liver tumor program, designed to provide multidisciplinary care for patients with primary and secondary liver and bile duct cancers, according to a press release.
“What we’ve seen in the past — because these are patients with tough problems and care depends on familiarity with these diseases — and what we don’t want to see is a patient bouncing around for 6 weeks, waiting on various studies and biopsies and things of that nature,” Theodore H. Welling, MD, from the director of the liver tumor program at Perlmutter Cancer Center, told Healio.com/Hepatology. “Our experts can get to a disease-management plan much more quickly and I think that saves a lot of angst for the patient.”
The liver tumor program is a new initiative at the Perlmutter Cancer Center that employs the expertise of radiologists, pathologists, oncologists, hepatologists and surgeons to provide parallel care for patients with solid organ malignancies that affect the liver and bile duct.
“It’s really every expert that is involved in the care or at least the diagnostic interpretation of the diseases you’d see in this area of the body,” Welling said.
Members of the liver tumor board regularly meet to evaluate new patients and coordinate imaging findings and pathology if required or available to determine the best course of action for a patient. At the same time, patients are assessed for their eligibility to undergo liver transplant or resection and whether they may benefit from inclusion in a clinical trial.
“We want to expand the clinical trial platform that’s available to patients coming into NYU,” Welling said. “The idea is that by bringing people together and having patients evaluated in a multidisciplinary clinic, that will lead to a more robust clinical trial framework.”
“The main thing is that we have a ready access to patient evaluation; meaning, we will get patients in within a week of the call or certainly the next clinic visit,” Welling concluded. “The goal of the program is to work in a fashion of teamwork and quickly evaluate and provide the highest efficiency of care to patients to make sure we find the best option is for patients.” – by Talitha Bennett
Disclosure: Welling reports no relevant financial disclosures.