As the result of an ASCO Board of Directors’ initiative, a new Community Research Forum will be working to identify and address two key issues per year in collaboration with community physicians involved in research.

The ASCO Board of Directors’ Clinical Trial Strategic Plan of 2010 has helped define the Society’s role in supporting clinical investigators and increasing participation in cancer clinical trials. ASCO’s next logical step was to create the Community Research Forum, as a large percentage of cancer care takes place in community practices.

“ASCO realized that we, the community physicians, have significant challenges to performing research. With 85% of patients being seen in community settings, and in order for research to advance more quickly, those issues need to be addressed,” Community Research Forum Chair Rogerio Lilenbaum, MD, said in an interview with The ASCO Post. Dr. Lilenbaum is Chair of the Hematology and Medical Oncology Department at Cleveland Clinic Florida.

The Forum will spend much of the year in small groups developing ideas, recommendations, and, ideally, benchmarking metrics and software solutions to address the identified problem. The group will meet each fall to discuss its findings.

The two issues the Forum is currently working on, chosen based on a survey of community physicians, are workload assessment and quality assessment.