5 Questions with... Jean M. Rosiak

1 What technology do you rely on most in your day-to-day practice?

Our healthcare system uses an EMR (electronic medical record), and it works pretty well. It’s great for continuity, and eliminating charts and paper. All the records from our system are available. We use PowerChart Office^TM, which we started in our clinic in March. We don’t have to look for paper or worry that we’re missing records. It’s a little hard for people to get used to—not having paper, having it on the computer—but it really has been a Godsend to have everything available there in front of you.

2 What one technology application in particular has helped streamline your day-to-day workflow?

I have used Epocrates for years on my Palm Pilot. You can look up a medication, and it’s right there. People always have questions, mainly breast cancer patients and those who have infections. Epocrates has a program on there where you can look up what antibiotics you use. The other thing I use is a breast cancer risk model for personal or family history to find out patients’ risk. Then based on that, I determine how to screen them or determine what type of surveillance to use to follow them. If their risk is high, then do you recommend an MRI every year, or just a mammogram? It’s truly helpful having it right there and patients are pretty impressed when they see that you’re using something like that to show them what their risk is and what they should do about it.

3 Please describe your experience with the CyberKnife^® Robotic Radiosurgery System.

My mother had developed breast cancer, and before they biopsied it, they talked to us about using CyberKnife. It was amazing—very impressive how they can just hone in and treat an internal organ without ever doing surgery. There was one woman there who had lung cancer that everybody had given up on, and they said that because she had such bad lung disease no one would operate on her. The Cyberknife was used on her, and she went to lunch the same day. Three to six months after follow-up, she looked fantastic.

4 What advice could you give our readers who are skeptical about trying a new technology?

If they realize that it’s not overwhelming, it can be easy. If you don’t know what’s out there, you don’t know what questions to ask. You can’t possibly know everything. Carrying a laptop around with you, you can hook right to the library and programs, like UpToDate, and look something up while you’re with a patient rather than letting them go and look at technology with a blind eye on their own.

5 What role does technology play in working with your patients?

We work with breast cancer patients who are adjuvant, online, or we can explain their risk of recurrence if we treat them vs. not treating them. You can actually show them how many people are alive or have relapse within the next 10 years. For patients who are thinking about chemotherapy and just don’t want it or don’t know if they want it, you can show them there are benefits they’ll derive from it. If it’s signifi cant, they’ll make a decision.