Closing the Communication Gap: Patient-Centered Care and Clinical Trial Integration in RRFL

In this episode, 'Closing the Communication Gap: Patient-Centered Care and Clinical Trial Integration in RRFL,' Christina Poh, MD explores the following questions:

One study from ASCO highlights a meaningful disconnect between how providers describe shared decision-making in RRFL and how patients actually experience it. Does this gap resonate with what you observe in your own practice or in the broader oncology community, and what do you think are the most actionable steps to close it?

Clinical trial access emerged as a significant challenge. In your practice, at what point in the treatment journey do you typically introduce the clinical trial conversation, and how do you think the field should standardize that approach across academic and community settings?

Christina Poh confirmed that the disconnect between provider and patient experiences of shared decision-making resonates strongly with what she observes in clinical practice, noting that while care teams tend to focus on efficacy and side effect profiles, the questions patients ask most frequently are logistical in nature, underscoring that closing this gap requires not only better communication, but also more robust patient navigation support, improved coordination between academic and community settings, and clinical trial designs that better reflect the real-world follicular lymphoma patient population. She also described her approach to integrating clinical trial conversations early in the care journey, typically introducing the concept during a patient's first visit and framing trials not as a last resort but as a legitimate treatment option at every stage and calling for greater standardization of this approach across both academic and community settings. Christina Poh further emphasized that better patient and nurse navigation infrastructure is needed to help patients understand their disease trajectory and feel genuinely supported throughout the decision-making process, so that treatment choices reflect not only clinical criteria but also the practical realities and preferences of each individual patient.

Throughout the conversation, the experts provide a comprehensive reflection on the field and the factors that may shape how clinicians approach care moving forward.

The next episode in this series, 'Managing the Tafasitamab Triplet: Safety Profile, Adverse Events, and Clinical Implications from inMIND,' features Christina Poh advancing her conversation on follicular lymphoma and focusing on what the inMIND safety data reveals about the tolerability of tafasitamab in combination with lenalidomide and rituximab, how the safety profile of the triplet compares to the R² backbone alone, and the most clinically significant adverse events observed in the trial and how they were managed.