Dr John Ward on Conversations With Patients After Multigene Testing

Multigene testing provides a lot of information that providers have to be familiar with in order to adequately explain it to their patients, said John H. Ward, MD, Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah.

Transcript

How does multigene testing change conversations between patients and providers?

I don’t think it’s changed much, because they’ve been available for a long time. I think there’s a lot of information there, and it requires being familiar with the assays so you can make sense of them to the patient, telling them how they’ve been tested, how to interpret the data. Two of the companies that have recently changed their reports, which make them much more easy to use and explain to patients the benefits or lack of benefits, and I applaud their decision to simplify things.