Dr. Watanabe-Galloway to speak before presidential panel

UNMC’s Shinobu Watanabe-Galloway, PhD, has been invited to speak before the President’s Cancer Panel at an Oct. 17 meeting of the group.

Dr. Watanabe-Galloway is the associate director of the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center Community Outreach and Engagement, as well as the Dr. Tim Hawks Chair in Cancer Prevention and Population Science in the UNMC Department of Epidemiology.

The President’s Cancer Panel is a federal advisory committee that monitors the activities of the National Cancer Program and reports to the U.S. president on barriers to progress in reducing the burden of cancer. This year, the panel is conducting a series of public meetings to discuss the current landscape of patient navigation with the goal of identifying opportunities related to the use of technology to support navigation of cancer patients to eliminate inequities in access to timely and high-quality cancer care.

Dr. Watanabe-Galloway has been invited to participate in an in-person meeting of the panel in New Orleans. This will be the first meeting of a series – Reducing Cancer Care Inequities: Leveraging Technology to Enhance Patient Navigation.

“As someone who studies the integration of mobile apps in health care settings, I am excited to be part of this panel,” Dr. Watanabe-Galloway said. “We have started seeing an increasing use of technology in health care settings. Patient navigation is one of the evidence-based interventions – it will be very interesting to see how we can integrate technology (e.g., apps) into the patient navigation intervention to increase access to quality cancer care.”

Kenneth Cowan, MD, PhD, director of the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center, said Dr. Watanabe-Galloway’s colleagues were pleased to see that she had been invited to panel.

“In her community engagement role at the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center, Dr. Watanabe–Galloway has been working with communities across the state to identify barriers and develop strategies, including the use of technology, expansion of access to clinical trials and the development of patient navigation programs, such as the one recently started here by Dr. Juan Santamaria, to increase access to quality cancer care across Nebraska and beyond,” Dr. Cowan said.

Information gathered during this meeting series will guide the development of the panel’s report to the president and recommendations to relevant stakeholders. In the past, panel reports have been widely used by other National Cancer Program stakeholders, both public and private, to highlight barriers and push for change based on the panel’s recommendations.