Ethan Basch, MD

Information about Ethan Basch's clinical work and patient appointment availability.

Current Research Interests

Dr. Basch is a practicing medical oncologist and health services researcher with expertise in patient-reported outcomes, clinical informatics, and drug regulatory policy. His research focuses on developing methods to better evaluate patient symptoms and adverse events. The objectives of this work are to improve the quality and comprehensiveness of information available during drug development and during routine care delivery—towards improving the patient experience with disease and treatment, fostering patient-clinician communication, and enhancing patient safety.

Dr. Basch's research group at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center develops questionnaires and electronic platforms for patient self-reporting, and evaluates models for integrating patient self-reporting into clinical trials and routine practice settings. He leads a National Cancer Institute (NCI) initiative to broaden this approach across cancer clinical trials for adverse event monitoring (the “PRO-CTCAE”) and he is national Chair for several multicenter trials in the cooperative groups and other consortia to evaluate approaches to collecting data directly from patients. His group is also involved with refining methods for measuring patient symptoms in the context of drug approval and labeling. Key findings of Dr. Basch's research program include that the current standard approach to adverse symptom event reporting in clinical trials—which relies on staff reporting—systematically underestimates the incidence and severity of these events compared to direct patient reporting. Patient-reported adverse symptoms are more concordant with underlying measures of health status compared to clinician reports, and self-reporting of adverse symptoms is feasible even by patients with severe illness, poor performance status, and heavy symptom burdens. In clinical trials. patient reports of adverse symptoms are better able to delineate toxicities between study arms, and better detect baseline symptoms. This work is funded by the National Cancer Institute, Department of Defense, American Society of Clinical Oncology, and several foundations. Dr. Basch is Chair of the Heath Outcomes Committee of the NCI Alliance Cooperative Group which represents the merging of the CALGB, NCCTG, and ACOSOG. He has chaired the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Clinical Practice Guidelines Committee and chaired or participated in multiple ASCO Guideline panels. He is an appointed member of the Methodology Committee of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). Dr. Basch serves on multiple other national and international committees involved with patient-reported outcomes, clinical informatics, comparative effectiveness research, clinical practice guidelines, and quality assessment.