Identifying professional education gaps and barriers in multiple myeloma patient care: findings of the Managing Myeloma Continuing Educational Initiative Advisory Committee.

Advances in the past decade and a half have led to unprecedented improved outcomes for patients with multiple myeloma (MM), and this disease appears to be transitioning to one more characteristic of a chronic disease in large part due to rapid translation of clinical insights into practice at the community level. Although evidence-based guidelines and consensus recommendations remain an important resource for managing cancer patients, they do not fill the gap between the principles of disease management today and the translation of tailoring treatment for individual patient needs. Thus, there is a continuing need for concise, focused educational activities and resources that facilitate improved knowledge and understanding of appropriate, individualized therapeutic strategies for assessing and caring for patients with MM. The next several years will truly be a time of shifting paradigms in the treatment of MM in which new agents will be approved, response criteria will be updated, and new approaches to risk assessment and monitoring minimal residual disease will evolve and enter practice. New groundbreaking therapeutic approaches, such as immunotherapy, might result in significant changes in how MM is treated and managed over the entire life cycle of the disease. Even the definition of the disease might be further amended as insights grow regarding who should be treated and who might benefit more from observation. As such, oncology clinicians will have to carefully review and update their management approaches accordingly even as they begin to focus even more on the survivorship needs of their MM patients.
(Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)