The Benefits of Working With HMX

Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Medical Oncologist, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Dr. Marios Giannakis worked with the HMX team to develop an online course on Cancer Genomics and Precision Oncology. “Working with HMX is very distinct from other opportunities that clinical faculty may be able to do,” he says. “It was absolutely a positive experience and definitely worth the time spent.”

I found the HMX courses to be very useful and innovative, and very distinct from others. HMX is an amazing team. They take a lot of pride in their work and put amazing effort into the presentation of the courses, meaning the visuals, the graphics,… the videos that are associated with the teaching modules are really of exceptional quality, which is not always a given, especially in online courses where sometimes slides are out of date or stagnant. These are dynamic illustrations, drawings, and animations that complement the material greatly.

The lessons build on each other and are also very instructive and “maieutic” – that’s a Greek word for the Socratic method – meaning they require the participants to contribute by answering questions and being actively engaged. A lot of thought goes into the assessments, both from the HMX team, as well as from the faculty to make them challenging enough to really test knowledge and expand the horizons of the participants, but also not impossible to answer. I think the whole experience of creating the course and the course itself shines because of the HMX team members that are actually helping to develop the course.

In terms of medical education, I felt that the courses were quite innovative and advanced. I wish when I was a medical student, I was being exposed to this type of material. The advanced level of the material in the Cancer Genomics and Precision Oncology course I contributed to, for example, may entice students to become interested in oncology, read more about it, and become excited about the field. I think that’s a major motivation for participating in the creation of these courses. Also faculty that are advising on these courses can share their enthusiasm about their specialty with the younger generation. The course could also be very helpful in oncology education outside the classroom setting of a medical school, for example, within a pharmaceutical company. The HMX course has providers of oncology in mind; you’d be surprised how many levels of providers within oncology – nurse practitioners, physician assistants – could benefit from these advanced HMX courses. I feel the course is only scratching its potential to be impactful in the field.

This experience has changed how I think about the audience of the people who need to, or want to learn about genomic technologies —it just has made it more palpable. HMX courses seem to be tracking along with the times, too. They’re current and updated continually. That is a function of the awareness and the work that is put in by HMX, but it also speaks to the utility of the courses for the audience. If this was really a course that was set in stone, sitting there for a decade, I think the audience would be much smaller, but the fact that these courses are actually on hot topics, hot fields, really makes them more relevant to multiple providers in our field in oncology.

HMX courses touch upon topics that are actually becoming more and more commonplace in clinical practice. You know, maybe even five years ago, six years ago, we couldn’t have envisioned, for example, a nurse practitioner, even a practicing clinician, being so interested in the cancer genome, but this has changed. Now precision molecularly based therapies in oncology have become so commonplace that patients ask about them. They may call our offices and an MD may not even be the first person to field the question—that could be a nurse practitioner or a nurse that actually has to answer some question about precision oncology. So I feel the course now is amenable and applicable to multiple levels of audience. There is good reason to expand these courses and get engagement by other faculty to bring more of the clinical perspective in education. They will be pleasantly surprised to find how they begin thinking of ways to bring education to the clinic.

Even for more novice learners, the course begins with this amazing introductory video about cancer and precision oncology created by the HMX team with my clinical input. This could be useful in educating patients and their families. And the way the diagrams are made they gradually build on each other. It allows for understanding at all levels, you know, especially if you think about the gene lesson: what is a gene driver, or what’s a tumor suppressor. These I felt were done well enough to come across even to someone without a formal medical education. I’ve even had an opportunity to present some of the slides from this course in an educational session with patients and their families and they were very well received actually.

As a young faculty assistant professor, I think working with HMX was a useful career experience for two reasons: First of all, teaching is an activity that is needed to demonstrate engagement in education, to promotion committees and so forth. Having teaching experience in a way that is flexible to our schedules as clinical faculty is not always easy to find and this opportunity allows for that — and this is an activity within Harvard Medical School; the HMX team is part of HMS. Second, of course, teaching and getting younger people, students, for example, interested in our field advances our careers indirectly. They may approach either the faculty involved in the course or medical oncologists in general, about research projects or new ways to become members of the field subsequently. Education is so important for the future of our knowledge and our fields.

The HMX courses will benefit from faculty engagement, too. I think bringing a clinical perspective to the HMX courses is actually exciting. There’s opportunity for the courses to include more clinically applicable scenarios. That’s actually one of the parts I enjoyed. There was an HMX Genetics Essentials course already, that is more about fundamental genetics, so the goal of this Cancer Genomics and Precision Oncology course was to try to bring genetics into a clinical specialty that cares about and relies on them, namely cancer medicine. So I felt this was an exciting direction for the course to take. This is where having other faculty involved in HMX courses could be extremely productive because then you have the synergy between clinical experience and clinical examples and the rest of the course.

Working with HMX is very distinct from other opportunities that clinical faculty may be able to do. A lot of us are teaching hands-on in our field to residents and fellows, for example. Some of us may also have some lectures to teach once in a while, to the medical school. I think very few of us are actually primarily engaged in formulating a course. HMX affords that opportunity. The degree of implementation of technology here, including the videos, but also filming parts of the course in the clinics and the pathology lab and so forth, was quite innovative and made this teaching experience unique. It was a very useful experience for me as a faculty.

I felt in terms of honing teaching skills, working with HMX was very valuable. The interesting thing you find out every time you have to teach something is that you really need to know it well, and by that, I mean, really study it again. I feel that all of us keep learning and there is something to be said about having to be engaged in a course and teach it to others, to strengthen our own understanding of our field. So although we are experts in our fields, teaching, being engaged in the experience further, solidifies that background knowledge.

And the input and expertise of multiple faculty ranks is valuable. There are other levels of engagement aside from being a primary faculty advisor on a course, including for example, being an expert consultant on one case or speaking to a very unique topic. For the Cancer Genomics course, for example, we had our own Nobel Laureate Bill Kaelin, adding some expertise around specific pathways, namely the hypoxia pathway, in cancer. So I feel multiple levels of faculty can be engaged at different levels.

Obviously time commitment is on all of our minds. But what I would say with that is that there is flexibility and that’s where working with a good team comes into play. The HMX team really makes this easier, working closely around our schedules. It was absolutely a positive experience and definitely worth the time spent.

I would encourage any faculty member approached by HMX to consider it seriously. I would say talk to the team, talk to other faculty members that have advised on these courses and don’t assume that this will take too much time. I feel it’s an enriching opportunity and the positives absolutely outweigh the time commitment. It was an amazing experience, so consider doing it. It was fun.

Dr. Giannakis worked with the HMX team and other HMS faculty to create a series of clinical application videos that are tightly integrated into lessons of the HMX Cancer Genomics and Precision Oncology course. These videos follow the path of a tumor sample as it undergoes genomic analysis to inform patient care. The series begins with this video filmed in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Pathology Department.

In the 6th video in the series, Dr. Giannakis sits down with HMX course lead Dr. Christine DeGennaro to recap steps of the process from tissue procurement to DNA sequencing and computational analysis.