Neal Bhatia, MD: Timing, Adherence, Unmet Needs Among Patients with Actinic Keratosis

In this segment of his HCPLive interview, Neal Bhatia, MD, described some other key points for dermatologists to be aware of when treating patients with actinic keratosis, including unmet needs and lack of awareness.

Bhatia is known for his work both as the director of clinical dermatology for Therapeutics Clinical Research and as chief medical editor for Practical Dermatology. This discussion followed his 2024 Winter Clinical Dermatology Conference talk on the same subject.

“Well, the challenges are really the dermatologist fighting for treatment, I think that's number one,” Bhatia explained. “You'll hear a lot about access, you'll hear about inability to really manage the local skin reactions. There's a lot of things that the pharmaceutical salespeople cannot talk about, in managing the applications of the therapies as well as their skin reaction. So this often falls on deaf ears, and then it's also about dermatologists taking the time to counsel the patient. So a lot of that goes into play.”

Bhatia noted that there is also a question of timing, as far as actinic keratosis management.

“Then the bigger thing is thinking about when do I see these patients back and how often I may think some of those challenges are still out there. And that's why that conversation should take place,” Bhatia said. “...I'm not sure we have as much unmet need as we have an unmet access or unmet utility. I think we're just under-utilizing the tools we have.”

Bhatia was then asked about what the barriers may have been to using some of those tools.

“Some of that is time in the office, where freezing and moving on is an easy thing to do,” Bhatia said. “Taking the time to counsel a patient on how to manage the topical application and the local skin reactions and giving them the sample to try. Obviously, that takes time in the day. If you have a good educated staff, and you work with staff on how to counsel patients. That's going to help but at the same time, it's really just a matter of getting them all on board.”

To learn more about the information described by Bhatia, view the full interview segment above.

The quotes used in this description were edited for clarity.