Abstract PO-040: The Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on cancer patient encounters

The outbreak of COVID-19 has upended the health care industry and the world as a whole, with the full effects unlikely to be realized for years to come. Unfortunately, cancer patients are likely to be disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, and there are a number of key efforts under way to explore this, including the COVID-19 and Cancer Consortium (CCC19) and the ASCO Survey on COVID-19 in Oncology registries. However, there have been few studies to quantify the immediate impact COVID-19 has had on deviation from normal cancer care, as well as declines in screening efforts. Less screening may lead to delayed diagnoses and poorer future outcomes. We were able to leverage an existing health research network platform (TriNetX) to create a cohort of 20 different institutions across the US representing over 29 million patients. We initially focused on all patients with ICD-10 diagnostic codes for neoplasms (C00-D49). Key findings include a marked decrease in the number of patients having neoplasm-related encounters for March and April of 2020 when compared to the same months in 2019, with January and February remaining largely unchanged. Specifically, comparing April 2020 to April 2019, we observed roughly a -56.9% drop in the number of patients with a neoplasm-related encounter and a -74.0% drop in the number of patients seen for the first time (e.g., screening, initial diagnosis, second opinion, treatment initiation). Similar trends were observed when querying for patients with encounters related exclusively to malignant neoplasms (ICD-10 C00-C96). Site-specific malignancies were also analyzed, with melanoma, breast cancer, and prostate cancer displaying the largest decline in patients seen, and lung cancer, colorectal cancer, and hematologic cancers the smallest drop. Finally, changes in screening were investigated, with breast cancer screening falling by -89.2% and colorectal cancer screening by -84.5% in April of 2020 compared to 2019. Ultimately, these analyses validate the vital need to study and monitor the effect of COVID-19 on cancer patients moving forward, and provide the largest study to quantify the changes in cancer encounters due to the pandemic to date. Citation Format: Jack W. London, Elnara Fazio-Eynullayeva, Matvey Palchuk, Corinna Mossop, Peter Sankey, Christopher McNair. The Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on cancer patient encounters [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Virtual Meeting: COVID-19 and Cancer; 2020 Jul 20-22. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Clin Cancer Res 2020;26(18_Suppl):Abstract nr PO-040.