Highlights

But right now, most of my patients are preferring in-person visits. And in-person visits are affected by COVID because we’re wearing masks, we’re maintaining as much distance as possible. We’re screening patients. We’re not allowing patients with recent contacts to even come into clinic. And then some patients who travel long distances or are worried about even just coming into the healthcare system, we’re doing video visits or telephone visits, about 10–20% of the patients.

There are different types of biomarkers that are used in prostate cancer. One is the kind of broad genomic tests. I look at those as more risk stratification tools. These are things like Decipher, Oncotype, Prolaris, and these are not commonly used. Mostly because we’re pretty good at identifying the patients already at high and low and intermediate risk. But there are some patients where they can be useful, particularly in patients considering active surveillance and they have a favorable intermediate-risk disease where they’re not sure if surveillance is the right thing for them. And sometimes these risk tools can help a patient decide if they’re on the fence; if the genomic classifier comes back higher risk that might push them to pick surgery instead of surveillance. If it comes back reassuringly low, that can provide reassurance that surveillance may be reasonable.