Spotlight on International Quality: COVID-19 and Its Impact on Quality Improvement in Cancer Care.

This report from ASCO's International Quality Steering Group summarizes early learnings on how the COVID-19 pandemic and its stresses have disproportionately affected cancer care delivery and its delivery systems across the world. This article shares perspectives from eight different countries, including Austria, Brazil, Ghana, Honduras, Ireland, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates, which provide insight to their unique issues, challenges, and barriers to quality improvement in cancer care during the pandemic. These perspectives shed light on some key recommendations applicable on a global scale and focus on access to care, importance of expanding and developing new treatments for both COVID-19 and cancer, access to telemedicine, collecting and using COVID-19 and cancer registry data, establishing measures and guidelines to further enhance quality of care, and expanding communication among governments, health care systems, and health care providers. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cancer care and quality improvement has been and will continue to be felt across the globe, but this report aims to share these experiences and learnings and to assist ASCO's international members and our global fight against the pandemic and cancer.

Health management via telemedicine: Learning from the COVID-19 experience.

At the onset of the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic, telemedicine was rapidly implemented to protect patients and healthcare providers from infection. It is unlikely that care delivery will fully return to the pre-COVID form. Telemedicine offers many opportunities to improve care efficiency, accessibility, and patient outcomes, but many challenges exist related to technology interoperability, the digital divide, and usability. We propose that telemedicine evolve to support continuity of care throughout the patient journey, including multidisciplinary care teams and the seamless integration of data into the clinical workflow to support a learning healthcare system. Importantly, evidence is needed to support this paradigm shift in care delivery to ensure the quality and efficacy of care delivered via telemedicine. Here, we highlight gaps and opportunities that need to be addressed by the biomedical informatics community to move forward with safe and effective healthcare delivery via telemedicine.