Physician Knowledge of Ethnicity Specific Differences in BRCA Genetic Testing

Video Education on Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer (HBOC) for Physicians: an Interventional Study

The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines are the gold standard in hereditary cancer risk assessment, screening, and treatment. A minority of physicians follow NCCN guidelines for BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations. This study assesses the impact of an interventional educational program on HBOC in terms of knowledge. Physicians were sent an invite to join either an intervention survey (web-training offered prior to the knowledge survey) or control survey (web-training offered after the knowledge survey). Sixty-nine physicians in the intervention arm and 67 physicians in the control arm completed the survey. The interventional group regularly answered items correctly at a higher frequency than the control group. For example, 64.71% (n = 44) of physicians in the intervention group knew that multi-gene testing does not have to include only highly penetrant genes compared to 32.84% (n = 22) of the control group (p < 0.01). Similar results were seen with other specific survey items. The current study is important in that it shows web-based education to be a feasible and effective modality for training on hereditary breast cancer. This type of education may be incorporated into CME programs and can be used as a foundation for further studies as well.