ACS, ASCO, and Jefferson Health open care hotline for Ukraine’s cancer patients

The war in Ukraine is trapping cancer patients in their homes and forcing doctors to provide treatments in bomb shelters. Those patients who make it across the borders to nearby countries show up without medical records—or with records that need to be translated.

Urgent questions posed by Ukraine’s cancer patients are a part of this humanitarian crisis.

Ukraine has about 179,000 newly diagnosed patients with cancer every year. As European and American oncologists design strategies to help them, the American Cancer Society, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center – Jefferson Health have established a hotline and resource hub to connect Ukrainian patients with oncology care.

The care hotline, which will provide information in languages that include Ukrainian and Russian, can be reached 24 hours a day:

“Disruptions to cancer treatment pose a grave risk to the survival of Ukrainian patients with cancer,” said Karen Knudsen, CEO of ACS. “We, along with our invaluable partners, are committed to leveraging our expertise and vast network to help Ukrainian cancer patients and their families, as well as the Ukrainian oncology research and care community.”

Related coverage of resources available to Ukrainian cancer patients and the international efforts to provide assistance appears here.

ACS, ASCO, and Jefferson are using ACS’s National Cancer Information Center (NCIC), which fields 250,000 calls annually, as a care hotline focused on the crisis in Ukraine. In February, ASCO and ACS said they would cross-share online resources related to cancer prevention, screening, and survivorship (The Cancer Letter, Feb. 4, 2022).

“I think our function here as both a call center and as a website is to be a clearinghouse and a connector across the cancer ecosystem, and to grow those connections over time,” Arif Kamal, the ACS chief patient officer, said to The Cancer Letter. 

“There’s a specific complexity and nuance that we’re very well poised to address, that are clinically complex questions for disruptions of cancer care,” Kamal said. “That’s what we do really well. What we’re trying to build up now is the capacity to connect people to resources in Eastern Europe.” 

To address challenges specific to oncology in Ukraine, ACS and ASCO have established a volunteer corp of 80-plus physicians, nurses, and other professionals—including volunteers with language backgrounds relevant to Eastern Europe—to work with NCIC staff.

“In addition to expanding our capabilities within the NCIC, we recognize that we’re going to get requests for information and connections to services and even context specific to cancer delivery in Eastern Europe that we may not have,” Kamal said. “So, we want to lean heavily on people who understand the area.”

Julie Gralow, ASCO’s chief medical officer and executive vice president, urged medical professionals to join the volunteer corp. (ASCO members can sign up for the corp by emailing international@asco.org; and all other oncologists and oncology nurses can register here.)

“As oncologists, our members are uniquely qualified to provide timely cancer information to help both healthcare providers and displaced patients in desperate need of cancer expertise,” said Gralow. “We’re calling on all those who are able to help, especially those who speak Ukrainian and other Eastern European languages from the region.”

A guest editorial by Gralow appears here. Over the past 25 years, Gralow has been working closely with Ukrainian colleagues and patient advocates to modernize that country’s cancer care and research infrastructure (The Cancer Letter, March 4, 2022). 

Healthcare organizations are trying to mitigate an “apocalyptic humanitarian crisis,” said Alex Khariton, vice president of cancer services and senior administrator at Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals and member of an ACS advisory board focused on patient support (The Cancer Letter, Sept. 3, 2021). 

“I had the opportunity to help translate, with the resources that I have, the call center waiting and hold messages directly into other languages,” said Khariton, who was born in Moldova and speaks Russian. “Even at Jefferson, we have multilingual physicians who speak languages including Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, and such, and those physicians volunteered right away to help and be part of that resource. “

ACS sees this care hotline as an urgent patient service program, Kamal said. 

“Any nonprofit might have led with, ‘How can we deploy other people’s dollars?’ and that’s just not what we’re going to be,” Kamal said. “The thing of how we’re going to support this financially and underwrite, and so on, is such a tertiary issue right now, because we’re just leading with doing the right thing.”

Although the team is still “iterating,” the care hotline has seen early success, Kamal said. 

“What we decided very quickly to do was to add the capabilities within the NCIC, to do a couple things,“ Kamal said. “One is to take inbound calls, particularly from Eastern Europe. At the surface, that sounds easy, but it’s actually quite complex, because we have to set up country-specific toll-free numbers. We have to set up live interpretation services. We have to set up live translation services for our chat. We have to staff up our center to be able to do that.”

Calls are starting to come in.

“One of the first couple calls we received, as an example, was a patient from Ukraine who receives her care in Kyiv, who is running low on osimertinib, who called to ask where she could get an additional supply of osimertinib, particularly in Poland,” Kamal said. “That’s a really complex question—you have to understand supply chain and drug and availability and pharmacy, etc. 

“We were able to connect that person through our call center to some contacts we have who we think are able to help, and we’re trying to do closed loop communication, so we check in with as many people as we can.”

Still, the organizations need all the support they can get in publicizing the fact that the hotline is available to oncology patients.

“We need people to use the services,” Kamal said. “We need people on the ground in Poland, in Ukraine, in Moldova, to know this, to know that it’s free, to know that we will do closed loop communication with them.”

“Sharing information is really, really important,” Jefferson’s Khariton said. “Getting to the right physicians and community and patients, making sure that we share this information and share what resources are available, that’s a really great way to help.”

Right now, this resource is tailored to the crisis in Ukraine, but ACS aims to develop the infrastructure to respond to future crises in other locations. 

“We’re recruiting a clinician volunteer corp that is for now specific to the response in Eastern Europe, but over time we’re going to recruit volunteers with more diverse language backgrounds, more diverse country of origin backgrounds, and keep them in a cohort,” Kamal said. “Our impact right now is very immediate, but our vision is medium- and long-term as well.”

“Shared ownership” by ACS, ASCO, and Jefferson Health is one reason that the effort is working well, Kamal said. 

“We’re really using this as a way to strengthen our relationship and find our unique offerings and differentiators in the world,” Kamal said. “For example, if it’s related to the oncology workforce, it’s hard for us to comment on that, but ASCO’s perfectly positioned to do that.”

Setting up the hotline has been a highly coordinated effort, Khariton said. 

“I have multiple vendors who are global and have resources, both logistic resources and contacts, local in Europe, Ukraine. I’m working on trying to understand the logistics of how to move supplies—if we collect chemotherapy, for example, which is really needed right now in Ukraine, how do we take that and distribute it?” Khariton said. “So, we shared that with American Cancer Society, and we’re trying to work together to find ways to collect and then ship that information or ship those supplies back to Ukraine.

“A lot of people are trying to help, and they all have different expertise and different connections. We’re trying to utilize all of that.”

The Cancer Letter focused last week’s issue on the state of oncology in Ukraine (The Cancer Letter, March 4, 2022).