The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) and the American Society of Hematology (ASH) recently announced a collaboration to expand access to LLS’s free service that provides clinical trials navigation and support to patients with hematologic malignancies and their families. With approximately 5% of adult patients with cancer enrolling in clinical trials, this collaboration aims to bridge this gap and connect more patients with blood cancer to appropriate clinical trials.
The collaboration facilitates a more efficient clinical trial search process by enabling the referring hematologist to provide key clinical details about their patients directly to LLS’s nurse navigators. This detailed information, in turn, helps the nurse navigators optimally tailor their search for the trials that would be most appropriate to the patients being referred.
Under the agreement, starting in January 2020, ASH will provide its 2,500 member clinicians in the United States and Canada access to LLS’s free Clinical Trial Support Center (CTSC) through a dedicated portal. CTSC nurse navigators, trained in hematologic malignancies, clinical trials, patient education, and support, have specialized expertise in working one-on-one with patients to identify appropriate clinical trials based on their diagnosis, overall health status, ability to travel for treatment, insurance restrictions, support systems, and other factors.
Benefits of Collaboration
The benefits of this collaboration for ASH member physicians and patients include:
- Easy access to CTSC nurse navigators through the ASH portal
- Highly trained CTSC nurse navigators work with patients and families to navigate trial inclusion and exclusion criteria and other potential barriers to enrollment
- CTSC nurse navigators provide patients, families, and their health-care teams free education and additional resources during the clinical trial process.
Before launching this collaboration, LLS and ASH conducted a 6-month pilot, which gave a small group of ASH physicians direct access to the CTSC, which opened in 2016. Pilot data showed that the service was of value to these ASH physicians.
To access the CTSC nurse navigators, ASH member physicians can visit www.hematology.org/clinicaltrialnavigation.
