Clifford A. Hudis, MD, FASCO, FACP, on ASCO Guidelines Assistant

I want to welcome everybody to the 2025 ASCO Annual Meeting. This is, as always, an exciting time in the year for us, when so much new science gets presented. Today, what I’m really excited about—above and beyond the cutting-edge new knowledge that’s being shared at this meeting—is how we’re going to distribute it to maximize impact for patients everywhere. The growth in information is something that we’re all grappling with. The explosion in publications—papers, that is—and information that could truly benefit patients is, I think, well known. The question is: how do we keep up? Even within ASCO, where we generate trusted, vetted, expert-prepared, peer-reviewed guidelines, it can be a problem just to find the information that a busy clinician needs in their day to make sure they are offering their patients the most up-to-date care possible. So thinking about those two related issues—the exploding basis of knowledge and the challenge of navigating to quick, accurate answers that a clinician can trust—the last year for us at ASCO has been an exciting one. We’ve partnered and collaborated with Google Cloud to create the ASCO Guidelines Assistant. And it is exactly what the name says—it’s really a discovery tool. What’s different about it compared to some other chat experiences that members may have had is that its answers to our questions are limited to the content of our guidelines. For every answer it gives, it automatically provides the relevant citation. If a user clicks on it, it shows them the specific guideline, when it was last updated, and it highlights in yellow the specific text within the guideline that supports the statement. So it addresses the question of trust, it addresses the question of discoverability, and it addresses the question of timeliness. We are really excited to be able to offer that to all of our members simply by logging on to the ASCO member app or going directly to the website at asco.org. GA—the name standing for Guidelines Assistant—is a small but really important step, I think, in our continuing journey to bring optimal, high-quality care to patients everywhere.