LUGPA Annual Meeting

"Being able to utilize advanced practice providers to extend us, to take care of our patients, [and] to treat them in a way that is beneficial and satisfying for them as a job is really important," says Neal Patel, MD.

“One important takeaway that we wanted to hammer home is that AI will not replace urologists, but urologists who use AI will replace those that don't,” says Neal Patel, MD.

"This is our biggest meeting ever in our 15-year history [with] almost 1100 people here," says Evan R. Goldfischer, MD, MBA, FACS.

"This all started because of the tidal wave of new therapies that are coming out for bladder cancer," says Jonathan Henderson, MD.

"There was also an emphasis on using pathways and navigation to help facilitate this large group of patients that are being seen by urologists," says Arpeet Shah, MD.

"They found that about 68% of the patients with a PSA less than 1 actually had a positive test. And that's really important," says Jason M. Hafron, MD.

"Patients shouldn’t be making the decision to do active surveillance without understanding what that means and what their other options are,” one panelist said.

“Radiation therapy continues to expand its role, especially if you start talking about [patients with] the ultra high–risk [prostate cancer] or node-positive [disease] and beyond,” says Daniel Spratt, MD.

“We went to medical school to take care of patients, not to service the computer, which is what we do for a large part of our daily work," said Inderbir Gill, MD.

"I think it may provide better care. What has been shown though, with some things, is that it can make mistakes and tries to cover them up, and that can be a problem also," says E. David Crawford, MD.

“There’s a lot of clinical trial activity in the [bladder cancer realm], and hopefully [new therapies will] keep adding to our armamentarium of [treatment strategies] we can offer patients,” said Gautam Jayram, MD.

In this interview, Scott A. MacDiarmid, MD, discusses health care professional burnout, including how he came to be interested in the topic and what can be done to prevent burnout.

“It's important that everyone understands that once women move up the ranks from becoming residents to fellows to attending, and when they're attendings if they move up in the leadership, that they remain available for questions, guidance, mentorship, [and] sponsorship,” says Jennifer Miles-Thomas, MD.

"An educated patient is one that's always going to want to be more involved in trying to make themselves better; they're going to be an empowered patient,” says Thomas J. Mueller, MD.

Much of the progress that has been observed in certain areas of prostate cancer care in the past 10 years could mirror what is on the horizon in the next 10 years in the bladder cancer space, according to Tom Jayram, MD.

"You might be the only female urologist in your practice, but you're not the only female urologist in the world, or in the country, or even probably in your state," said Kari Bailey, MD.

“One reason [the role of radiation has expanded] is the accuracy and precision of treatment, irrespective of a patient’s mutational profile. Radiation, irrespective of that heterogeneity and those mutations, has a high probability of killing those cancer cells,” said Daniel Spratt, MD.

"Urologists can play a central role in helping women through the symptoms that are associated with hormone issues," says Sarah K. Girardi, MD, FACS.

"We're all going through the same thing, so we should not be reinventing the wheel," says Dr. Kari Bailey.

"In Arkansas, for example, we now have half the urologists that there were 25 years ago, and that's with an increasing population. That's a representation of what's going on across the country," says R. Jonathan Henderson, MD.

“It certainly seems that we're moving into medical management of advanced diseases,” says J. Christopher Webster, MD, FACS.

“From a patient care standpoint, anything that opens the door and makes the patient feel more secure and open is going to lead to better outcomes for them and allow us to serve their needs best,” says Benjamin Lowentritt, MD, FACS.

“New imaging has rapidly changed the advanced prostate cancer landscape, and all of the existing studies that we have are based on older imaging,” says Dr. Henderson.

"In a phase 2 clinical trial, we saw that erdafitinib had an objective response rate of around 40% in patients who received prior chemotherapy for their metastatic disease," says Dr. Siefker-Radtke.

“From just a regular business sense, we can’t raise prices to offset some of our supply cost problems,” says David Morris, MD.

"There's 3000 patient trials that are either done or going to be done within the next year or 2 in the BCG-naïve setting, and all of them have systemic therapy," says Joshua J. Meeks, MD, PhD.

"People are starting to retire, and there isn't that much production of urologists every year; there's about 270 that come out for the whole country," says Richard Harris, MD.

"We want to make sure that independent urology continues to thrive by recruiting new people to independent urology. That's what we're going to try and do," said Evan R. Goldfischer, MD.

"Specifically for our transgender and gender-diverse patients, there are still insurance issues and access issues in general," said Diana K. Bowen, MD.

For patients with mCRPC who experience disease progression on novel hormonal agents (NHAs) and androgen deprivation therapy, it is important to consider when the NHA was received and whether docetaxel has been administered, explains Evan Y. Yu, MD.