Balancing Trust and Oversight: How Much Should Oncology Lean on AI

Welcome back to Health Tech Checkup! Hosts Perry Dimas and Rachel Gallant are joined by Dr. Rebecca Miksad, Chief Medical Officer at Color, for a conversation about what it actually takes to deliver guideline-quality cancer care at scale. Where does AI genuinely help? Where does it still need to earn our trust?

‍

Dr. Miksad, a Harvard-trained medical oncologist who moved from treating GI cancer patients into digital health strategy, walks through the gaps that pulled her out of the clinic and into building systems: patients getting younger and younger colon cancer diagnoses, life-changing trial data that never reaches the people who need it, and a survivorship crisis that's almost invisible. There are 8 to 10 times more cancer survivors than active cancer patients in any given population, yet primary care physicians rarely get trained to support them once treatment ends.

‍

The conversation covers how Color's 50-state virtual cancer clinic works, the first (and currently only) virtual practice to earn ASCO certification, and what that certification required: meeting the same seven domains of care (patient engagement, 24/7 availability, evidence-based medicine, comprehensive team-based care, quality improvement, goals-of-care conversations, and antineoplastic therapy safety) that brick-and-mortar Centers of Excellence are held to.

Enjoying the show? Make sure to leave a review!

‍