Advances in Outpatient Care Transform Delivery of Bispecific Antibodies, ADCs: Scott Soefje, PharmD, MBA, BCOP

Scott Soefje, PharmD, MBA, BCOP, director of pharmacy cancer care at Mayo Clinic, details how his institution safely administers bispecific antibodies and antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) in the outpatient setting in part 2 of an interview at the Patient-Centered Oncology Care^® conference in Nashville, Tennessee.

Watch part 1 to learn about the role of oncology pharmacists.

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

As you know, bispecific antibodies and ADCs are reshaping cancer treatment options. What have you learned about safely delivering these therapies in outpatient settings, and who is benefiting most from them?

It's kind of fun because Mayo Clinic was one of the leaders in doing outpatient bispecifics. In fact, the first bispecific that we did, we did it as an outpatient because we felt that it was not necessary to admit the patient for everything.

Where the pharmacy really fit in this is that one of our pharmacists helped design the policies and procedures around how we were going to do outpatient bispecific therapies. We do something a little unique. We have remote monitoring capabilities, so we send the patients home with an iPad that's connected to the internet, and then we send them home with a thermometer, a blood pressure cuff, a pulse [oximeter], and all of that is tied to the iPad.

Then, we have them do vital signs on a regular basis. We also teach their caregivers how to identify certain signs and symptoms of toxicity. Then, we see the patients back on a very frequent basis; sometimes it's daily. You put all that together, and we've been able to push most of our patients to the outpatient setting.

Do we have people who still get admitted? Yes. We'll start them as an outpatient, and then they'll get a toxicity, and we'll end up admitting them. We're even starting to think about, can we manage some of the toxicities in the outpatient setting. That's sort of the next step.

ADCs have been a little easier. They're a little more conducive to treating patients in an outpatient setting. That's pretty common for us to do those at this point in time. At Mayo Clinic at this point, we do bispecifics, we do CAR [chimeric antigen receptor] T cells, we do bone marrow transplants. All of those patients are in the outpatient setting, and so we're constantly looking to how we can do that more efficiently.