For some years, the Miami Breast Cancer Conference has been using electronic keypad polling to allow attendees to compare their practice patterns to those of other physicians. To enhance this activity, we have produced reports for the last two meetings that tabulate responses to interactive case questions along with commentary from faculty members. The enclosed 2001 report is designed to be inserted into your educational binder. It features comments from Dr Nancy Davidson and Dr Monica Morrow and can also be accessed on BreastCancerUpdate.com and CancerConf.com along with the 2000 meeting interactive report, which featured Dr Patrick Borgen and Dr Andrew Seidman.

Breast cancer consensus conferences and practice guidelines only address a fraction of the plethora of clinical decisions that practitioners face every day in managing breast cancer patients. The challenging cases presented in our interactive questions led to an interesting range of responses, demonstrating the variety of practice patterns in clinical situations that are still being defined by clinical studies. As pointed out by Drs Morrow and Davidson, current cooperative group clinical trials are likely to provide answers to many of these dilemmas, which will then lead to a new generation of unanswered questions. Our plan is to use interactive cases to successively track these issues over the next few years in terms of how physicians incorporate research findings into clinical decision-making.

—Neil Love, MD