Project Funding Details

Personalized medicine offers to improve patient outcomes and reduce costs by using individual, genomic or molecular information to tailor medical treatment to each patient. However, the benefits of personalized medicine will not be realized unless cutting-edge, scientific advances can be translated into tests and therapies that are used appropriately. There is no assurance that personalized cancer tests and treatments will be used in the right patient populations at the right time. It has been well documented that the quality of cancer care is highly variable in the United States and that existing personalized genetic technologies are under used. In fact, the translation of scientific discoveries into high quality, evidence-based cancer care has been deemed a priority area for research. A driving factor in the adoption of new technology is information exposure. It is critical to study information exposure in the setting of personalized cancer care because information exposure influences health knowledge, medical decision-making, and health policy. A key question that we will address is whether information dissemination on a population level (the media and internet) and on an individual level (oncologist and patient information acquisition) may be driving the appropriate or inappropriate use of novel cancer technologies. We will use lung and colon cancer as "case studies" to understand the relationships between information dissemination and the use of personalized cancer care. We will evaluate information dissemination from three complementary angles (the media, patients, and oncologists) with the goal of understanding if and how individual and population-level communication factors influence the use of personalized cancer tests and treatments. We will accomplish this goal by analyzing news media stories and internet websites to understand how they frame issues related to personalized cancer care and if they commonly promote unproven technologies. We will also survey patients and oncologists to determine whether the ways in which they learn about novel cancer technologies are related to their use of or recommendation for personalized cancer tests and treatments. The proposed work will help to determine if the media and internet commonly promote proven or unproven technologies and if patterns of information exposure are associated with the use of standard or non-standard tests and treatments. The results of this work will have broad implications for cancer education and will inform the policy debate surrounding the regulation of publicly available cancer-related information. The proposed studies will also determine the aspects of information dissemination that have the greatest potential to influence the appropriate and inappropriate adoption of new technologies and thus help us to design future communication interventions that aim to optimize cancer care.

Personalized medicine offers to improve patient outcomes and reduce costs by using individual, genomic or molecular information to tailor medical treatment to each patient. However, the benefits of personalized medicine will not be realized unless cutting-edge, scientific advances can be translated into tests and therapies that are used appropriately. There is no assurance that personalized cancer tests and treatments will be used in the right patient populations at the right time. It has been well documented that the quality of cancer care is highly variable in the United States and that existing personalized genetic technologies are under used. In fact, the translation of scientific discoveries into high quality, evidence-based cancer care has been deemed a priority area for research. A driving factor in the adoption of new technology is information exposure. It is critical to study information exposure in the setting of personalized cancer care because information exposure influences health knowledge, medical decision-making, and health policy. A key question that we will address is whether information dissemination on a population level (the media and internet) and on an individual level (oncologist and patient information acquisition) may be driving the appropriate or inappropriate use of novel cancer technologies. We will use lung and colon cancer as "case studies" to understand the relationships between information dissemination and the use of personalized cancer care. We will evaluate information dissemination from three complementary angles (the media, patients, and oncologists) with the goal of understanding if and how individual and population-level communication factors influence the use of personalized cancer tests and treatments. We will accomplish this goal by analyzing news media stories and internet websites to understand how they frame issues related to personalized cancer care and if they commonly promote unproven technologies. We will also survey patients and oncologists to determine whether the ways in which they learn about novel cancer technologies are related to their use of or recommendation for personalized cancer tests and treatments. The proposed work will help to determine if the media and internet commonly promote proven or unproven technologies and if patterns of information exposure are associated with the use of standard or non-standard tests and treatments. The results of this work will have broad implications for cancer education and will inform the policy debate surrounding the regulation of publicly available cancer-related information. The proposed studies will also determine the aspects of information dissemination that have the greatest potential to influence the appropriate and inappropriate adoption of new technologies and thus help us to design future communication interventions that aim to optimize cancer care.