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LSU Health New Orleans’ NCORP was able to not only maintain its numbers of participants through the pandemic but increase them.

One reason may be a pilot program that overcomes a major barrier for oncology practices outside of academic health centers – the lack of trained research nurses. They are a highly specialized group of health care providers that are too expensive for community practices to employ. The brainchild of Eileen Mederos, RN, Clinical Trials Network Manager at LSU Health New Orleans, the Virtual Research Nurse (VRN) Program fills that need.

“We can bring specialized research nursing support to physicians and clinical practices regardless of their location by utilizing virtual communications technology,” Mederos says. “Through this program, the Gulf South NCORP can link urban and rural community oncology clinics to provide patients with access to clinical trials that they may not have had otherwise.”

It is a new take on telemedicine.

“So, what we did in our Virtual Research Nurse Program, was to flip Telehealth around,” Dr. Ochoa explains. “Instead of bringing the doctor to a distant clinic through virtual communications, we’re bringing the specialized research nurses virtually to oncologists in existing community practices.”

The trained nurse at LSU Health New Orleans interacts virtually with the community oncologist to select clinical trials, screen the clinic, and identify candidate patients. The VRN helps the doctor with enrollment, consenting and programming the patients into a clinical study, and establishing a treatment plan that follows the requirements of the study. The VRN sets a calendar of activities, notifies the patients of upcoming visits or exams, and provides adequate follow-up information to the doctor of new clinical studies for their patients.

Initially funded by the Al Copeland Foundation, LSU Health New Orleans’ groundbreaking VRN Program is now also supported by a pilot grant from the National Cancer Institute, which recognizes the potential of the VRN program to revolutionize clinical trial enrollment.

Says Al Copeland, Jr, who learned firsthand what cancer patients go through after such a devastating diagnosis when helping his father, “Patients have three things they have to consider. One is where is the latest and greatest care. How do I get there, and do I have enough money to do it? And when I think about this Virtual Nurse Program, it checks all the boxes.”

Dr. Biden, accompanied by Senator Bill Cassidy and Congressman Troy Carter, along with Mayor LaToya Cantrell, saw a live demonstration of LSU Health’s VRN Program connecting Mederos, herself a trained research nurse, to Memorial Gulfport Hospital in Mississippi.

In her remarks to a large group of invited guests that included Dr. Steve Nelson, LSU Health New Orleans Interim Chancellor, and LSU Health New Orleans cancer clinicians and researchers, Dr. Biden said, “You know that the breakthroughs and the discoveries that you make here — every cancer-causing virus we learn how to defeat, every clinical trial that ends in success — become the miracles that our families are praying for. Your work changes lives, and it saves them.”

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