Next chapter: cancer care with new tools and technologies

While the U.S. is making progress toward major cancer-related targets as defined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Healthy People 2030 objective, cancer remains the second-leading cause of death in this country. Roughly 1.9 million new cancer cases are expected to be diagnosed in the United States in 2022, and about 609,360 Americans will die from cancer this year.^[i] There are also some disturbing trends among the three most commonly diagnosed cancers: prostate, breast, and lung. For example, rates of distant-stage prostate cancer have been increasing since 2011, as has incidence of female breast cancer.^[ii] Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer death overall among both men and women.^[iii]

What’s clear is that oncology departments desperately need to transform their approaches, facing today’s biggest challenges in cancer care with innovative solutions and strategies to achieve better outcomes faster.

Obstacles to cancer care

Here are the four biggest hurdles to better outcomes in cancer care, and how oncology departments will need to pivot to address them.

1. Offering the right cancer care at the right time to the right patient

Most medical therapies are designed with the average patient in mind, which leads to typical outcomes. Personalized precision healthcare changes the game. Precision healthcare delivers a customized course of treatment based on data collected from a patient’s genetic makeup, health history, family medical history, and lifestyle choices. Of course, there is considerable debate on how best to effectively harness this data, meaning that machine learning and artificial intelligence need to play an increasingly larger role in managing care. In fact, a recent study estimates that in the future, 15 percent of current working hours will be replaced by automation, which, thankfully, will allow clinical staff to spend more time on direct patient care. So, oncology departments will need to stay on top of emerging technologies more than ever in order to stay not just effective, but competitive.

2. Managing a growing list of medical specialties

When patients are diagnosed with cancer, they are forced to learn a new vocabulary that includes the names of various medical specialists—for example, the medical oncologist, who oversees the patient’s general care; the radiation oncologist, who administers radiation therapy to specific sites; and the surgical oncologist, who performs biopsies and removes tumors and other cancerous tissue. As if that wasn’t difficult enough, the burden of facilitating the communication among all of these specialists often falls on the patient. Increasingly, the best oncology departments will be the ones that help facilitate this communication. Strategies that can help synchronize and simplify access to data and improve communications for the care team include a cloud-native radiology system, which leads to ease of viewing from anywhere, anytime; a vendor-neutral archive that secures clinical data storage at scale; advanced visualization, which boosts productivity across radiology; and clinical apps empowered by AI and advanced analytics.

3. Selecting the optimal therapy among numerous options

The good news: Medical oncologists, who administer various treatments, including chemotherapy, immunotherapy, hormone therapy, and other types of drugs to cancer patients, have a broader range of treatment options and emerging treatment options than ever. But no matter how much these specialists stay on top of the latest options and clinical trials, selecting from all of these therapies requires leading health systems to embrace emerging therapies. One of those is theranostics, which combines diagnostic and therapeutic agents, eliminating multistep procedures, reducing delays in treatment, and improving patient care. Using theranostics offers advantages that include accurate diagnosis,^[iv]  tumor-specific delivery of drugs, and reduced lethal effects to normal tissues. Some of the tools that are helping to improve theranostics are GE HealthCare’s PET CT and SPECT CT. PET CT is made for personalized care. High resolution and exceptional sensitivity allow it to detect small lesions, and quantitative tools make it possible to more accurately monitor therapy. SPECT CT combines two different diagnostic scans into one for a more complete view of the body region being studied. In short, what practitioners of theranostics will be able to deliver is truly targeted, personalized cancer care that is above and beyond the levels currently practiced. If theranostics is not part of your cancer care program, in all likelihood it will need to be soon.

4. Enabling interoperability

Disparate data systems and interfaces, coupled with an exploding volume of information, are huge barriers to delivering coordinated oncology care. Forty percent of leading health systems rate oncology care and provider coordination as top challenges at their organization—scoring higher than drug cost pressures and workforce challenges. The coordination of care has been a long-standing challenge in oncology. As one executive put it: “Oncology is the ultimate team sport, with many providers, clinicians, and support staff involved in care, which is often spread across numerous locations.” Technology that solves for interoperability can transform information into actionable insight that meaningfully affects patient outcomes. For example, many leading health systems have reported engaging in virtual tumor review boards (though they are still figuring out how to leverage technology to improve care coordination more broadly). Others are looking at opportunities to connect systems and data to help improve interoperability while effectively enhancing care and helping to reduce costs.

Solutions to cancer care

Now let’s look at some of the specific advances that are addressing the obstacles to care and helping to improve time to diagnosis and treatment, as well as outcomes with innovative cancer care solutions. 

Breast cancer

In 2022, an estimated 287,850 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed in women in the U.S., along with 51,400 new cases of noninvasive (in situ) breast cancer; about 43,250 women are expected to die from breast cancer in 2022. For women in the U.S., breast cancer death rates are higher than those for any other cancer besides lung cancer.^[v]

Early-stage cancer detection could reduce breast cancer death rates significantly in the long term. In fact, the most critical point for the best prognosis is to identify early-stage cancer cells.^[vi] With that in mind, GE HealthCare introduced the One-Stop Clinic™ for breast care (OSC) model, which was brought to the U.S. in 2019. This model offers several opportunities for increased cost savings and efficiencies. For example, patients with screening mammograms who have suspicious lesions are referred to the One-Stop Clinic and check in only once, because they undergo diagnostic tests and procedures the same day. Because radiologists see the patient after diagnostic workup, they don’t have to continue to review the case throughout the patient care pathway.  

The goal of the OSC here in the U.S. is to increase value by optimizing outcomes through a transformed care pathway by reducing the time to screening with a precise diagnosis and treatment plan, moving from days to hours.

At the St. Luke’s site, 40 percent of patients received results in 36 hours or less, and 60 percent received results in 48 hours or less.

Lung cancer

While lung cancer is the third most diagnosed cancer, it’s the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. This high mortality rate results from the fact that most patients are not diagnosed until they are in late-stage cancer, which does not allow them to respond to conventional treatment. One study shows that the average time from developing symptoms to the beginning of treatment was 138 days,^[vii] with lung cancer patients waiting an average of three weeks to see a doctor after symptoms developed, and another three weeks to begin following up with specialists. That same study showed that among a population of 73 patients newly diagnosed with the disease, 70 percent presented at stage IV.

GE HealthCare and Optellum, a U.K.-based company that specializes in lung health solutions, have partnered to enable early and accurate lung cancer diagnosis through AI. Not only is it difficult to accurately diagnose lung cancer in a timely manner, but the majority of incidentally detected pulmonary nodules also present an inconclusive cancer risk, between 5 and 65 percent. This makes diagnosing and managing these lesions incredibly challenging. Optellum's Virtual Nodule Clinic is the only product for lung cancer scoring cleared by the Food and Drug Administration and has been seen to improve the AUC accuracy of pulmonologists’ and radiologists’ malignancy assessments in both high- and low-risk patients.^[viii]

Optellum Virtual Nodule Clinic also streamlines and supports the ability to apply precision healthcare solutions to every patient by allowing clinicians to review relevant patient information in one view, track pulmonary nodules longitudinally, and use the AI lung cancer prediction feature to confidently determine potential malignancy before biopsy. This has the potential to reduce the incidence of unnecessary surgical intervention and improve targeting, reducing false positive results and enabling optimal clinical decision-making for each patient.

Prostate cancer

Other than skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most common cancer in American men. The American Cancer Society estimates there will be about 268,490 new cases of prostate cancer and about 34,500 deaths in the U.S. in 2022. About 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime, and about 1 in 41 will die of the disease.^[ix]

But while it can be serious, most men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not die from it. In fact, more than 3.1 million men in the United States who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer are still alive today.

Part of what’s helping the numbers go in the right direction? Better tools and speed to precision diagnosis, thanks in part to the use of GE HealthCare’s Magnetic Resonance (MR) PROView, a simple, guided workflow including prostate volume calculation, PSA density, lesion mapping and measurement, utilizing PI-RADS™ v2.1 report guidelines to help standardize the MR evaluation of prostate cancer. Also paving the way to help improve outcomes are GE HealthCare’s PET/CT scanners, some models that can have high sensitivity, motion correction and quantification capabilities, which are useful for prostate cancer imaging, where optimized reconstruction algorithms can be developed based on a patient’s clinical needs. And, finally, AIR ™ Recon DL, a pioneering deep-learning-based MR imaging reconstruction that challenges the historic trade-off in MR by delivering higher SNR and sharper images, while enabling shorter scan times.

Together we are stronger

Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a team to treat a cancer patient.

“Cancer care can only be improved if those involved work together,” says Jan Makela, President and CEO of Imaging at GE HealthCare.

That’s why we’ve entered into myriad partnerships (in addition to Optellum, we’ve joined forces with Elekta, SOPHiA GENETICS, RaySearch, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Spectronic, and Mirada, to name a few) to ensure that patients are matched with the right treatments and doctors.

While much has changed since GE HealthCare opened for business 130 years ago, one thing has remained constant: our focus on innovation and helping our customers improve patient outcomes. From precision medicine to partnerships, we are proud to offer the tools and information that clinicians and leading healthcare systems need to improve outcomes.

 

RELATED CONTENT

• Please view GE HealthCare's Oncology Solutions for more information.
• Learn about GE HealthCare's Breast Care solutions

 

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