Life, Career, Leadership and Success – Dr. Clifford Hudis, CEO of ASCO

Dr. Clifford A. Hudis, CEO of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), joins us as the distinguished guest on “OncoInfluencers” on OncoDaily. Hosting this enlightening episode alongside Dr. Hudis is Dr. Gevorg Tamamyan, bringing insightful discussions and perspectives on the latest trends and developments in oncology. In the interview, Dr. Hudis discusses ASCO’s organizational efficiency and impact, his professional growth at ASCO since 2016, personal pride in family and patient care, his passion for reading, and the importance of collaborative leadership for organizational success.

Clifford Hudis serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and holds the position of Executive Vice Chair of its Conquer Cancer Foundation. His involvement with ASCO spans various leadership roles, including serving as President during the Society’s 50th anniversary year (2013-14). Before his full-time engagement with ASCO, Dr. Hudis was the Chief of the Breast Medicine Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York City, and also a Professor of Medicine at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University.

Dr. Hudis is dedicated to driving ASCO’s strategic objectives, focusing on research, and education, and ensuring high-quality, equitable patient care for the Society’s nearly 50,000 members. Reflecting on his passion for the field, Dr. Hudis remarks, “What makes oncology so attractive to me is that mixture of science and caring.”

Gevorg Tamamyan is the Editor-in-chief of OncoDaily, President-Elect of SIOP Asia Continental Branch and Pediatric Oncology East and Mediterranean (POEM) Group, and the CEO of the Immune Oncology Research Institute (IMMONC). He is the Chairman and Professor of the department of Haematology and Pediatric Oncology at Yerevan State Medical University.

He is a Co-Founder and Board Member of the Armenian Association of Hematology and Oncology, City of Smile Charitable Foundation, Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of the Institute of Cancer and Crisis, the Former President of the Harvard Club of Armenia.

00:00 Recap
00:41 Introduction
01:58 What’s the key to your success?
02:32 Who is your role model?
04:59 What was the most important thing you learned from Dr Norton?
11:00 What is leadership for you?
14:01 Health Equity and Disparity
25:12 Plans of ASCO for getting more global involvement
33:08 What are your top three books?
37:00 When can we expect the book from Dr. Clifford Hudis?
48:06 How you would describe yourself in one sentence?
48:31 Who should we interview next?

Gevorg Tamamyan: Hello everyone, welcome back to OncoInfluencers on OncoDaily and today is a great honor and pleasure for me to welcome Dr. Clifford Hudis, the CEO of American Society of Clinical Oncology. Thank you very much Dr. Hudis for having a time for us. I’ll just make a short introduction, although I’m sure anyone in the oncology field does not need this introduction, but anyway, I’ll do just a few sentences and we’ll go further.

Dr. Hudis is the chief executive officer of ASCO, as I mentioned. He also serves as the executive vice chair of the Concord Cancer Foundation. Previously, he served in a variety of volunteer and leadership roles at ASCO, including its president during the society’s 50th anniversary in 2013-2014.

Before coming to ASCO full-time, he was the chief of breast medicine service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York and professor of medicine at Weill Cornell. As CEO of ASCO, Dr. Hodges is responsible for delivering on the board’s strategic goals through research, education and promotion of the highest quality equitable patient care by the society’s nearly 50,000 members. Dr. Hodges, what’s the key to your success?

Clifford Hudis: Maybe just being born at the right time in history, in the right place with a supportive family and an environment that allowed me to learn what I needed to learn, focus on what was interesting and contribute in the way that I’ve gotten to.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Who is your role model, Dr. Hudis?

Clifford Hudis: Well, I don’t have a single role model, but for different aspects of my life, I have a number of role models. I guess I don’t really know exactly which way to start, but from a personal and professional point of view combined, my wife is a fantastic role model, having taught me a great deal about both how to function, be efficient and accomplish a lot, but also how to be connected and humane at the same time. Professionally, in a more narrow sense, I was very fortunate in the early part of my career to have a really remarkable mentor, Larry Norton at Memorial Sloan Kettering.

And that was happenstance. It ties back in a way to the first question you asked about secrets to my success. And I said, a lot of it was just, in a sense, being in the right place at the right time.

In this case, I was at Memorial as a first year fellow when Larry was hired to really ramp up a breast medical oncology program. And so I was part of the build out of that program. And that gave me an opportunity to see a wide range of both scientific precision, translational medicine practicalities, but also at the same time, group dynamics and leadership skills that I think are hard to teach and really important to learn.

So those are certainly a couple. In this role at ASCO, another important mentor or role model, I should say, for me was, of course, my predecessor, Alan Lichter, who served as the CEO for about a decade. And many of the things that he repeatedly would say and that he modeled and taught me are things that I’ve tried to incorporate into my own leadership here at ASCO because they were thoughtful and effective.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Thank you very much. What was the most important thing you learned from Dr. Norton? I’ve seen your photo on Twitter.

You were saying, like, every CEO needs a mentor, right, with him?

Clifford Hudis: Yeah. Well, I mean, so a couple of things. I think Larry was always uncompromising in pursuit of the very best science with relevance to the care of the patients.

And I think that focus was the most important thing. The second thing was he used that enthusiasm to rally an ever-growing team of people behind that goal. And I think without saying that it was strategic planning, it was really good modeling of the importance of clarity and strategic planning.

Gevorg Tamamyan: So he was the president of ASCO in 21, 22, right? And then you became the president. Yeah.

Clifford Hudis: No.

Gevorg Tamamyan: 2001, 2002.

Clifford Hudis: Norton? Yeah. Was, I think, the president in 1998, more or less.

Okay. Like, he was the, like, ASCO president? No, that matters because there was a transition inside Memorial at that time where he stepped down as the chief of the Breast Cancer Medicine Service.

And that’s when I became the chief.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Oh, okay. I see. So I was…

He was also president and then his mentee, like, also became the president of ASCO.

Clifford Hudis: About 18 years later. Yeah.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Yeah. So should we expect, like, 18 years after your presidency, one of your mentees to be… That would be quite an honor for me.

Okay. During your theme as a president of ASCO, it was the science and society. Right.

You gave the lecture with the title science and society 50 years later. 10 years passed since your lecture. Anything you would like to add or say about it?

Clifford Hudis: Well, let me say a couple of things. First of all, that theme was of the time we were in then. It is, however, absolutely relevant today.

And I’ll expand on what I mean. At the time, one of the things that was concerning to me was that there seemed to be a growing schism between the way that the scientific community thought about evidence, data, and recommendations, action, and so forth. And the way that the lay public, in some cases, was thinking about it.

Outside of oncology, but related, was the developing educational debate at that time about teaching Darwinian evolution in public schools. That was just one example of this. But there were others.

And what I hoped at the time that we would do would be to increase the communications between the general public and the scientific community, and that we would use, in some cases, frankly, a diagnosis of cancer and the deeply scientific, evidence-based approach we strive to deliver across the world in oncology as an opportunity to show people the value and importance of scientific method and process.

Part of this relates to understanding that most answers are not final, that the process of science is the process of questioning and evolving new answers.

And it means that when we change seemingly our opinion on something over a period of time, it’s not that we were overtly right or wrong at any given moment. It’s that the understanding of the world evolves, and we get better at it. And sometimes that looks like we’re just changing our opinions, and that can feel like whipsawing almost the general public in some cases.

But understanding that that’s the process we go through and how we get there, and that there are ethical, well-meaning, hardworking people behind it was really the goal to decrease the suspicion, if you will, of scientific recommendations. Now, unfortunately, we all know what’s happened in the last decade, including the years of the COVID pandemic.

And certainly in some parts of the world, there has been a backlash against scientists and the scientific method that in some cases has truly harmed us and set back some of the translation and application of the very progress that we’re so dedicated to achieving.

And I think that this is really tragic. And I think you almost could see this as another version of an evolving divide in the world. People talk about elites and non-elites, the haves and the have-nots, but increasingly there’s a risk that the people who understand, embrace the scientific method, and therefore engage in best practices, evidence-based practices, are going to find themselves with better health than the people who are unfortunately rejecting all of them.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Yeah. Thank you. Leadership development is a key ASCO effort to ultimately build and deliver a better future for patients with cancer.

That’s your words, right? Right. What is leadership for you?

Clifford Hudis: Well, I have obviously found myself a leader at multiple phases of my career. I was made the chief of breast cancer medicine at Memorial Sloan Kettering when I was in my late 30s. I was pretty young for that.

And here I’ll just interject that I never had formal training in any aspects of management, business administration, leadership as such. My experience is typical, or at least it was, and it is part of the reason for ASCO’s deepening dedication to providing leadership development and leadership tools for all of our members. This is not something that’s necessarily taught.

In my case, it was well modeled, as we’ve already discussed, and I had the benefit of very effective mentors who were leaders. But the real question is, how do we get all of that out to the rest of our community, all of which needs it? But to answer your question more specifically, for me, leadership is obviously providing the support and the vision to enable a team to accomplish a shared goal.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Thank you very much. I’m going to use also this opportunity to thank for all, I mean, for me personally, ASCO made a lot of things. I mean, I was an idea recipient, then life recipient, and then also leadership development program, and volunteered also volunteering for the committees.

So ASCO made really, I mean, it was a life-changing experience for me. And you might not remember, but in 2016, we had a very short discussion in Paris during the World Cancer Leaders Summit, when you asked me, okay, I remember your face. I mean, you were one of the life or idea recipients.

What’s your like, what did you accomplish? So you were checking, I mean, a very short discussion. And I asked, why you are asking?

You said, because I want to know, I mean, what, like our kind of people who, I mean, we invested in, what they are doing, and where are they doing? I mean, this was a discussion which resonated later on with me, certainly. And I think, I mean, this is also a very important part of the leadership, especially if you are leading a huge society, which is covering all over the globe, from like students up to the, I don’t know, very senior people.

When I go through your posts on social media, it’s very clear that, I mean, you care a lot about the health equity and about the disparities. You raise a lot of, I mean, questions about it and the voice, how you see it right now, the health equity and disparity, and what we should do more to make it better place. 

Clifford Hudis: So we became doctors and oncologists to take care of everybody. And the issue of health equity is a really basic issue for me, which simply is every human deserves access to the optimal care and best possible outcomes for whatever ails them. And that’s the fundamental simple goal of our health equity efforts.

It is obviously, it has been true, both within the United States and around the world for as long as we’ve been in modern medicine, that that is an elusive goal, that there are many, many groups of people who, for a variety of reasons, do not have access to what we know from scientific evidence is the best possible care.

And each time anybody is denied optimal care, the whole world suffers because whatever talents, skills, contributions those individuals might make over their lifetime, they are compromised when their health is compromised. So it’s, in my opinion, not even that lofty a goal.

It’s a shared benefit for us to pursue health equity. Now, more narrowly in the United States, in particular, we have been able to see with greater and greater clarity, which factors identify individuals and groups of people who have excessive barriers to care. And nobody can, in a sense, solve this whole problem overnight.

But what we are dedicated to doing is identifying those places where our skills and ability as a professional society are able to, in some way, move us all forward. And that’s the issue. So because it is so important, not just to me, but to our board and our membership, it is a cross-cutting component of our current five-year strategic plan.

And it’s related, by the way, to the second cross-cutting component, which is making a global impact. These two cross-cutting initiatives are, I think, inextricably tied together because making global impact in many cases relates to addressing access to care and research issues. I say that they’re cross-cutting because our intention is for these two efforts to touch and shape all ASCO activities.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Collaboration is the key, right? And recently, you joined the efforts with the American Cancer Society for creating a joint platform. I mean, usually it’s like, I mean, the societies are, not societies, but in general, organizations and people are very difficult to give something kind of, or to share something.

What’s your thoughts about it? By the way, I mean, just to continue what I said, our mutual friend, Richard Sullivan, was giving an example. He was telling that like, there are two kinds of people, right?

The people of reason and people of vanity. And by the way, and he was telling that if there are like more leaders who are people of reason, we would get a better place in the world. And when you were discussing, he was giving your example as a people of reason.

Clifford Hudis: Oh, that’s nice. Thank you. This particular collaboration is somewhat unusual.

And I would say it’s one of those things where we identified a win-win-win. And let me elaborate. ASCO is a professional society serving a professional community around the world.

And our job, if you think about it, is to enable each of our individual members to have all the tools, resources they need to deliver the highest quality cancer care. So while the end result of our work should be ever higher quality of cancer care, the specific role we play is to enable the individual physicians, nurses, others to access the tools and resources they need to do that. Okay.

Along the way, many, many years ago, ASCO was gifted a patient-facing educational resource that actually had this very long name. It came from a commercial pharmaceutical company that could no longer, I think, provide it because of issues around advertising and promotion. But it had originally people living with cancer.

And then it was shortened over the years to Cancer.net. It grew into a beloved resource for ASCO, several hundred volunteers providing the highest quality award-winning content, keeping it up to date. It had both disease-specific treatment information, and also it had blogs and breaking news in terms of scientific or clinical scientific progress.

All of that was great. Among our challenges was that it was not well-recognized by the using community. The number one site for cancer information in the United States, the last time we looked was cancer.org, which in fact is the website of the American Cancer Society. And in contrast to what I just said, the American Cancer Society’s primary audience are patients and families with cancer. They’re not a professional society. So several years ago, it occurred to me that, and others, that in an ideal world, we wouldn’t be competing to do this good, which was to deliver patient information.

We would be collaborating. And I began discussions at that time with the leadership of the American Cancer Society because, in a sense, I, with some jealousy, wanted their viewership. I wanted our award-winning content to be seen by the numbers of people who they were drawing.

And said another way, if we’re going to invest the time and effort in creating this award-winning content, it should be seen by the maximum number of people. So we began discussions, and when their current CEO, Karen Knudsen, came in, and I began to talk with her in the very first days that she was on the job about her leadership approach and resources and how she was going to address some of the many complex challenges that face them as an organization, I offered up the possibility of collaborating on this issue as well. And we began it as a pilot.

We started in particular with the ASCO post-treatment survivorship care plans, and the screening and prevention guidelines that were really part of the ACS website. And we began to cross-reference the websites to see if we could save a little bit of time and effort by using each other’s resources on the fringes. And that worked well.

It gave us confidence and courage that we could collaborate further. And then in the last year and a half or so, we really rolled up our sleeves and committed to joining this effort. Now, it isn’t finished yet, I should say.

This process of putting it all together is going to take at least 18 more months. But what we’ve already done is to retire Cancer.net and begin to collaborate on the material. And the give and take of this is that the ASCO material is branded as such on the American Cancer Society website.

So, I am hoping that as this works out, we will reach more people. Our name will be associated with high-quality content that benefits the broader community. And we will all save some money, time, and effort because there’ll be much less duplication of effort across our community broadly.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Thank you very much. Really very important effort. In 2011, when you were just starting your position, during the interview, you were talking about ASCO being global and international, and you mentioned the former logo with the globe.

But the logo changed and now is without the globe, although it’s clear that ASCO’s global involvement increased significantly during your term.

Clifford Hudis: Well, I just want to interject here. I think there are two issues here. I was on the Board of Directors 2008 to 2011.

And I was the president of ASCO 2011 through 2014. In 2016, after departing the board as an elected volunteer, I came back as a full-time employee as a CEO. In that era, which was a half decade later, one of the things that struck me is we have this lapel pin.

Here’s an example that we often wear. And I would get on an airplane and people who didn’t know ASCO would look at it and they wouldn’t see the globe. They would see ASC and then this small thing that was indeed meant to be both the O and the globe.

In the interest, I would say with humility, recognizing that we are not a household name. And in the interest of clarity of communication and standardization, at that time, in the first year that I was here, we adopted this. It’s over here.

Sorry. Yeah, this simple font. And it’s universal.

It’s the same font across all ASCO’s entities. And it’s really meant because our name, again, is not household known. We need to make it easy for people to see it and know what it is.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Yeah, to continue, but like really the global involvement is increasing and certainly there is much more now.

Clifford Hudis: That’s right. But changing the branding of ASCO was really just done to improve external communications.

Gevorg Tamamyan: What’s your plans for getting more global involvement?

Clifford Hudis: Well, we are, of course, a member-driven organization and about a third of our members right now are outside, drawn from outside the U.S. It all starts with a very simple idea. There are roughly, what, 335, 340 million Americans right now and more or less 8 billion people on earth. So it’s hard to say that you are relevant to the global community if you’re only serving roughly 4 or 5 percent at best of the world’s population.

And it’s true that our name is American, but that’s actually a good thing in this regard because, of course, the high quality science and research clinical care in America is something that I think the world has respect for and in most cases wants to be associated with. However, that doesn’t diminish our aspiration, which is to make an impact globally. And so in that regard, we have done several things in recent years.

The first is a practical thing. We have simplified our overall membership model. We just launched that in March of 2024.

But somewhat related to that, even back about a year and a half earlier, we stopped charging membership fees for professionals from low- and low-middle-income countries. And this is both to achieve our mission, which is to reach people who might not have the resources to join ASCO, but it’s also a long-term investment because optimistically I believe some of those countries will rise out of the low- or low-middle-income group. And actually, therefore, their members will begin to qualify to pay for some of the services and membership here at ASCO.

The second thing, of course, is within ASCO, we have departments, but ASCO consists of more than the 501c3 tax-exempt organization that you’re used to. There is the Associated C6, which is our association for clinical oncology, and that’s where a lot of our policy and domestic lobbying activities take place, as well as some of our quality programs. There is also, of course, Conquer Cancer, which is our associated foundation.

And because of that, there are certain activities that transcend the C3 that need to touch all three of the big organizations in ASCO now. And for that purpose, we have been increasingly creating what we call centers. So, unlike a department, a center may or may not have externally facing products, but it’s responsible internally for coordinating activities across departments and across entities.

And, of course, we have our Center for Research and Analytics, our Center for Ethics and Integrity in the Law, our Center for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. And this year, we added our Center for Global Impact. And this was an upgrade of our former International Affairs Department.

And all of this is to enable us not only to gather more resources to make a global impact, but also to be sure that those resources are made available to all the components of ASCO and its entities, and that we have the efficiencies of scale that we can gain by doing these things in a coordinated way across all of ASCO. And just, you know, to close that out, our hope is that over the years, what knowledge and access gaps might exist across different parts of the world.

And I’m not even saying that there are greater access or availability in the U.S. I’m just saying that there are gaps in multiple directions, and therefore, we can both narrow those gaps and learn from the people who have successfully achieved progress in various parts of the world, and in some cases, import that. And, you know, this is an area of, I would say, like, ongoing low-level excitement. We’re excited every day about what’s happening globally. And what we see is steady incremental progress that we find really, really rewarding.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Thank you. What’s the thing you’re proudest of?

Clifford Hudis: Oh, in my professional life? Or, I mean…

Gevorg Tamamyan: You can ask whatever you want.

Clifford Hudis: Well, I mean, you know, my personal life, it’s my family and what happiness we’ve been able to create for ourselves. And the way in which we are able to contribute and make an impact and a difference in the world. Certainly, that’s one way to answer your question.

Within ASCO, I can be a little more granular and say, having arrived here in 2016, and when I arrived, having arrived to a really high-functioning and well-resourced, well-oiled machine, I am proud that we’ve been able to take those assets and further refine and organize them through gradual evolution in the style and function of the actual leadership of the organization. The creation of and adherence to a strategic plan and the development of a budgeting process that’s closely tied to that strategic plan. All of this has allowed us, I think, to prioritize with greater and greater precision and be clear about what we can do and will do versus those things that we shouldn’t be doing, even if they’re good things for the world.

Even if the things that need to be done, they’re not things that we necessarily are best able to do. Having those discussions with clarity and being able to make choices, I think, represents a significant next stage in ASCO’s evolution and growth. And I am proud that we’ve been able to do that.

To turn it just one more way, but it’s related. And I think if you talk to leaders who were in position through COVID, you hear this more often than you may realize, navigating through COVID, as difficult and challenging as it was for so many of us, also reflected, I think, on the skills and resources and resilience of so many members of our team, so many of the ASCO staff, they made it possible for us to get through that in a way that I think, in retrospect, wasn’t necessarily predicted.

And I am proud that we were able to do that together.

Gevorg Tamamyan: You said on a personal note, of course, it’s your family. Can you tell a bit more about your family?

Clifford Hudis: Well, so my wife is a business executive with her own laudable career. And I have two grown children who are thriving in their professional careers. That makes me very, very happy.

Doctors? Or no? No, no physicians.

If there’s any disappointment in my life, that’s it. But that’s not to say I’m disappointed in them. What they’ve chosen to do is important and makes a difference.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Thank you. You enjoy reading. What are your top three books?

Clifford Hudis: Oh, God. Well, it’s always, of course, changing. I just went back, funny enough, about three weeks ago, and read Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.

I don’t know why I went back to read that just now. But it was interesting to me because one of the things that I’ve been struck by in recent years is that as challenging and difficult as the current day can often feel, I’m not convinced that everything is that different from how it was many, many decades ago. And reading Naked and the Dead, there were subtle themes around misogyny, racism, and so forth that aren’t that different from what we see today.

Now, it’s not to say that we haven’t made progress, because we actually clearly have. But the way he describes people talking and what they thought isn’t seemingly that different. And I’m echoing something from a couple years ago when I read David McCullough’s biography of Truman.

It really struck me that President Truman faced an unbelievably divided country, a country where it was unsafe for him to go and campaign personally for re-election because of his fledgling anti-racist steps. And so when you think about that level of divisiveness in the United States, and then you compare it to where we are today, sometimes it starts to seem familiar rather than so different. Another book, though, that I have to say I really found amazing was Covenant of Water, which I read in part because I had enjoyed Cutting for Stone, but also, of course, Lynn Schuchter this year invited Abraham Bergese, the author, who is himself a physician, to speak at the opening ceremony of ASCO.

And if you haven’t watched that, if listeners to this show haven’t watched that online, it’s worth the 20 minutes or so. Unfortunately, he actually got COVID, and he did this remotely by live Zoom, but I don’t think it mattered. He was a compelling presence in that opening ceremony despite being remote.

And the book, of course, ends up being more about medicine than it might seem at first. And he talked about that, about the power of touch, the physical exam, in particular, in his opening ceremony remarks. So those are a few.

There are a number of others. I’m fortunate to belong to a book club, and we meet quarterly and assign ourselves a book. And we generally talk about the book for 60 to 90 minutes before deteriorating into cocktails and dinner.

But it’s really a wonderful group, and it stimulates continuous reading. I’ll say one more small thing, which is interesting. I just thought of it, but my mother, who’s 86 years old and, of course, retired, has always been an unbelievably voracious reader.

All through my childhood, we went to the library to get books. That was just an activity for us. And she shares my Kindle account, and so she constantly prompts me to buy her books, which keeps me exposed to the various new things to read.

Gevorg Tamamyan: That’s nice. When can we expect the book from Dr. Clifford Hudis? I know you want to be also a writer.

Clifford Hudis: Yeah, so I write every week a blog for the staff. I started to do this in maybe the last week of February of 2020, as the pandemic was really impacting us. I got very concerned about the emergence of full-time remote work and what it would mean culturally for our staff.

And so to try to both enhance seemingly emergent acute communications, but also to keep us bound together culturally, I began to write. I began as a habit to write every Sunday from Monday morning. As the pandemic evolved, as we came back into the office, I’m in the office today, of course, and we have been for a couple of years, I continued to write because I decided it was a good way as a leader to let the staff and colleagues know what I was thinking about, what I had seen that week, what I was planning.

And my blog, therefore, has become a, I don’t know, 45-week-per-year summation of almost everything that’s going on within ASCO. I’ve been at times tempted to go back and pull those columns together and create some sort of a leadership book or a book on leadership in medicine. I have to say, and I don’t want to throw them under the bus, but my friend, Paul Goldberg, who publishes The Cancer Letter, he dismissed all of this with a scoff and said, ah, nobody wants to read that.

So it was a little demoralizing to me. And of course, I respect his opinion because he is a published novelist and accomplished writer. But I may someday develop the backbone and find the time to overcome his challenge and put that together, we’ll see.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Yeah, because, I mean, I’m sure it will be, with all the respect, but I’m sure it will be interesting for many, especially for the younger colleagues. No, I’m sure. I mean, in my office, and I come back to this book many times, I mean, during the year, it’s like this world-class, which I got from the airport.

I don’t know if you had the chance to read it. It’s about like revitalization or kind of revival of New York Langoon. And what books are they?

It’s called World Class.

Clifford Hudis: Oh, yeah, yeah. I’ve not read it yet. Yes.

Gevorg Tamamyan: It’s, I mean, I think, especially for a young professional, it’s such a like inspirational, and not only inspirational, but also, I mean, there are day-to-day activities and kind of things which are very educational. So I’m sure your book will be similar way, very educational, I’m sure.

Clifford Hudis: Thank you. Yeah, one thing I would say, though, it’s an interesting point you just made quickly, which is a lot of times, it’s the small things that are done constantly every day that, in the end, make the big difference.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Yeah, certainly. In 2007, you answered the question that, about getting a call from the patients. And you said, in my opinion, patients should always feel free to call their doctors 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year for any concerns, especially related to toxicity or unexpected side effects for chemotherapy.

Do you still take the calls from your patients?

Clifford Hudis: Well, first of all, I don’t want to be misunderstood. They should have somebody to call.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Okay. 

Clifford Hudis: Second of all, when I took this job, because I took care of patients with breast cancer, and I had a large population of survivors who had been through adjuvant therapy, I asked for permission to continue to volunteer when I was free to see my follow-up patients unpaid. And so in 2016, I began to see my patients in follow-up in my clinic on Friday afternoons in New York when the office was arguably a little bit slower. And I was really not seeing anybody who was actually sick.

I was seeing people who were taking tamoxifen or taking an aromatase inhibitor, by and large, and not seeing or treating anybody with active metastatic disease, for example, not giving parenteral therapy to anybody. So, if I see a new patient in that setting, they would, by definition, have the very lowest risk breast cancer, and they would be basically seen and slotted right into follow-up, if you will. So, I did that because, given the opportunity, I wanted to be able to stay in touch with my colleagues and some of the realities of clinical care.

Because of that, I still have patients who have occasional issues come up. And in my situation, because the volume is so very low and the urgency and acuteness of all of this is low and the events are rare, yeah, I take calls. In fact, of course, I have a great nurse practitioner and colleague who was with me when I was in full-time practice and is still there and is the front line.

But I talk to my patients every week, probably several times per week, about little things. Increasingly, it’s referrals of friends, it’s helping them navigate the system for family and so forth. But I think that’s all part of being a doctor, if you’re lucky enough.

So, yeah, the short answer is yes, I still absolutely do that and I still help try as much as I can to help. I will say with humility that my practice is getting smaller and smaller with each passing year.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Yeah, sometimes there is a perception that CEOs of societies or hospitals should be, like, from the business side, managers or not the physicians. But we don’t, your own story, and I’m sure there are many other stories as well, you prove the opposite and I’m, like, for that side as well.

Clifford Hudis: Yeah, but I have to interject something. I’m very fortunate that I happened to be a breast cancer doctor, I happened to be focused on adjuvant therapy for so much of my career and therefore I had a practice that could actually be managed this way. With all due respect, if your focus was a much more acutely challenging disease, be it acute leukemia or pancreatic cancer, this model that I just described is very unlikely to work.

So, I don’t begrudge any CEO or manager who reaches a point where they say it’s not responsible for me to see patients. You can’t be a part-time doc taking care of sick people in my opinion.

Gevorg Tamamyan: No, no, no, I was not meaning that. I was meaning that sometimes people are thinking that, I mean, there is some this kind of discussion that the CEOs of hospitals should not be doctors, like doctors as physicians professionally, but rather coming from financial side or, I don’t know, from manager side, but I think that’s the opposite, because if you have this like two kind of knowledge and you’re coming from the medical field, you know how the patients are.

Clifford Hudis: So, that’s a really interesting point. I would say the following. Nobody is a master of everything, at least very few people are.

Number one, the leadership development program we spoke about earlier and the increasing focus in some quarters on the training and education of physician leaders, I think, makes this particular dilemma less of a problem maybe as we go forward. Number two, it’s all a question of both the individual and the team. So, the charter for ASCO mandates a physician CEO.

The majority of American professional societies are not led by physicians, they’re led by management professionals, often lawyers or MBAs or association professionals, of which there are many. And what I think in each case they demand is complementarity in the part of the people around them. So, for example, there are professional, I’m sorry, there are healthcare facilities that have established dyad leadership where they have a business expert partnered with a physician, for example.

There are others that have been lucky to find physicians with stellar business management and leadership skills, so they really can bring it all together. In my case, to be very blunt, I was fortunate to come into ASCO with a very strong CFO and a very strong colleague who became ultimately our chief operating officer and had tremendous inside knowledge over the decades of ASCO. And so, the team of a physician leader with people with operational and financial knowledge from decades is, I think, the reason that we’ve been able to succeed.

But it comes back to the same point, which is it takes a team, it takes collaboration, communication, and I don’t think there’s a single answer for any organization. In fact, you’ll see organizations over time that have the flexibility to go from one kind of a CEO to another as they try to compensate for what was good and what was lacking in the prior term. So, I’m flexible in my view of all of this, that’s my point.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Yeah. How you would describe yourself in one sentence?

Clifford Hudis: I am motivated and dedicated to, I’m motivated by and dedicated to the premise that an individual can make a difference in the world and make it a better place for all. 

Gevorg Tamamyan: Thank you so much. And the last question, who should we interview next?

Clifford Hudis: I know you’ve already interviewed our chief medical officer, Dr. Greylaw. Yeah, it’s a pleasure. Well, certainly, I think two names that come immediately to mind would be Dr. Monica Bertagnoli, who is the NIH director, and Dr. Kim Rathmell, who replaced her at the NCI. Kim is, of course, I mean, each of them have deep ASCO ties in different ways. Monica was president of ASCO, and Kim was in our first or second, I can’t recall, class of leadership development program. And I think each one of them would provide interesting leadership insights for you.

Gevorg Tamamyan: Thank you very much for the suggestions. I’m going to write an email to them and tell that Dr. Hudis suggested, so they will not be able to reject. 

Clifford Hudis: Well, they both work for the government, so.

Gevorg Tamamyan: I know, I know. Yeah. Thank you so much, Dr. Hudis, and thank you very much for a very interesting interview. It was so inspirational and motivational, and I’m sure people are going to enjoy it. Thank you so much.

Clifford Hudis: Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Previous episodes of OncoInfluencers

Episode 1: OncoInfluencers: Dialogue with Françoise Meunier

Episode 2: OncoInfluencers: Dialogue with Dean Crowe

Episode 3: OncoInfluencers: Dialogue with Nagashree Seetharamu

Episode 4: OncoInfluencers: Dialogue with Julie Gralow

Episode 5: OncoInfluencers: Dialogue with Lillian L. Siu

Episode 6: OncoInfluencers: Dialogue with Douglas Flora

Episode 7: OncoInfluencers: Dialogue with Pasi Jänne

Episode 8: OncoInfluencers: Dialogue with Tony Mok

Episode 9: OncoInfluencers: Dialogue with Fadlo R. Khuri

Episode 10: OncoInfluencers: Dialogue with Julie Ross