Faculty Spotlight: Hannah Dzimitrowicz McManus, MD
Assistant Professor, Medical Oncology
As one of the top teaching hospitals in the country, Duke Medicine has a long-standing tradition of attracting top talent to its faculty ranks. The work that our trainees and young faculty members have chosen to pursue is some of the most innovative and forward-thinking in field of medicine. Hannah Dzimitrowicz McManus, MD, assistant professor in the division of Medical Oncology, is among these rising stars, and shares some insights into her oncology work.
Q: Tell us about your clinical, academic, or research interest and why you are passionate about this topic.
McManus: I am a medical oncologist specializing in the treatment of patients with genitourinary (GU) malignancies, including prostate cancer, kidney cancer, bladder cancer, and testicular cancer. In addition to my clinical work, I am a clinical researcher focusing on clinical trials for patients with GU cancers and utilization of real-world data to understand patterns of care for patients with GU malignancies. The overarching goal of my research is to improve care for patients with GU cancers and to better understand the impacts on patients’ quality of life. I am passionate about this research because it allows me to tackle unanswered questions that may inform the care I provide for my patients in the future.
Q: Tell us about the focus of your work.
McManus: An area in which I focus is on the use of real-world data to describe treatment patterns and address clinical questions for patients with urologic cancers. This work includes a variety of data sources, including large national registries, disease-specific prospective registries, and electronic health record data to address questions regarding treatment-related outcomes, survivorship, and impacts on quality of life for patients with urologic cancers.
Q: How does your work improve health outcomes in our communities?
Along with efforts to improve overall health outcomes for patients with GU cancers, I am passionate about efforts to improve health outcomes in our local communities. In collaboration with my colleague Dr. Matt Labriola and Duke Health’s Collaborative to Advance Clinical Health Equity (CACHE), we have been working to utilize Duke prostate cancer screening data to help us identify disparities in completion of diagnostic testing for patients with elevated PSA tests. The goal of this work is to identify patients who have delays in this care and may benefit from interventions to improve this care. Efforts like this are satisfying in that they focus directly on improving care for patients in our local communities and working to address cancer disparities.
Q: You work closely with mentor Dr. Dan George in researching cancer disparities. Can you please tell us about this work and its significance?
McManus: I have the great opportunity to work closely with Dr. George and other mentors in the GU oncology community to research disparities in genitourinary cancers with the goal of trying to identify disparities in receipt of care, outcomes, and impacts on quality of life for patients with prostate cancer and kidney cancer. As an example of this work, we are utilizing data from IRONMAN, a diverse prospective registry of patients with advanced prostate cancer, to characterize real-world treatment patterns, reasons for treatment decisions, changes in quality of life, and potential disparities in these outcomes. Identification of and better understanding of these potential disparities in prostate cancer care can allow for future design of interventions to address these disparities.