ASCO: You’re listening to a podcast from Cancer.Net. This cancer information website is produced by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, known as ASCO, the world’s leading professional organization for doctors who care for people with cancer. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guests’ statements on this podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Cancer research discussed in this podcast is ongoing, so data described here may change as research progresses. Brielle Gregory Collins: Hi, everyone. I'm Brielle Gregory Collins, a member of the Cancer.Net content team, and I'll be your host for today's Cancer.Net podcast. Cancer.Net is the patient information website of ASCO, the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Today, we're going to be talking about clinical practice guidelines, including what they are, how they're developed, and how they can impact care for people with cancer. Our guests today are Dr. Jeffrey Meyerhardt and Dr. Scott Tagawa. Dr. Meyerhardt is the Douglas Gray Woodruff Chair in Colorectal Cancer Research, clinical director, and senior physician at the Gastrointestinal Cancer Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He is also the Cancer.Net Associate Editor for Gastrointestinal Cancers. Thanks for joining us today, Dr. Meyerhardt. Dr. Meyerhardt: Thanks Brielle. Brielle Gregory Collins: Dr. Tagawa is a professor of medicine and urology and the medical director of the Genitourinary Cancer Research Program at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is also the chair of ASCO's Evidence Based Medicine Committee, which works to create clinical practice guidelines. Thanks for joining us today, Dr. Tagawa. Dr. Tagawa: Thanks for the invitation. Brielle Gregory Collins: Before we begin, we should mention that Dr. Meyerhardt and Dr. Tagawa do not have any relationships to disclose related to this podcast, but you can find their full disclosure statements on Cancer.Net. Now to start, Dr. Tagawa, what are clinical practice guidelines? Dr. Tagawa: So as the name implies, there's clinical practice. So I as a practicing physician, for instance, might have a patient in front of me, and sometimes I want to know, what's the best thing to do? What is the best test that I might want to get? What is the best type of a treatment to use? I think these are especially important as the numbers of different types of cancers continues to grow, as we have more diagnostic tests and number of treatments that we have continues to grow. It's very hard for an average clinician to remember everything that's there. So we have guidelines that will give us information and general guidance for a particular situation, for a general patient population. Those don't necessarily mean that for an individual patient, that's something we have to do. But again, for the average patient in this individual situation, it helps us guide the physician or practice team in what we should do. Brielle Gregory Collins: Got it. Thank you so much for explaining that. And, Dr. Meyerhardt, how can guidelines impact care for people with cancer? Dr. Meyerhardt: Yes. So there's a lot of data that's out there for a lot of different cancers. And so to keep track of that, all of the different pieces of a study, it is helpful for groups of experts to get together and say what's really the right care for patients with this condition and what are the different options for them. And it really helps to really collate those all together and to be able to help clinicians decide what's the right initial step and subsequent steps for the care of a patient. As Dr. Tagawa said, it may not be the exact thing that's right for every patie