Q and A with Estelamari Rodriguez, M.D., M.P.H.
Bilingual Sylvester thoracic oncologist and researcher is devoted to understanding and advancing health equity for cancer patients.
In her spare time, Estelamari Rodriguez, M.D., M.P.H., likes to make fun TikTok reels with her teenage daughter.
But most days, social media is just part of a more serious endeavor for Dr. Rodriguez, who is devoted to outreach, communication and connecting with patients at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
Born in Puerto Rico, Dr. Rodriguez is co-lead of the Thoracic Site Disease Group at Sylvester and its associate director of outreach. She also serves as Sylvester’s assistant director of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Her research focuses on health disparities, including a recent study on how access to the best care improves outcomes in patients with mesothelioma, a rare lung cancer linked to environmental exposures like asbestos.
On Tuesdays, Dr. Rodriguez often can be found enrolling people in early-stage clinical trials at Sylvester’s main Miami campus. Her fluency in Spanish helps forge connections with Spanish-speaking patients.
“I have a passion for patient education, mentoring, recruitment and advocacy work. I have an opportunity to not only represent the Hispanic community but also highlight the barriers to care that our community faces,” said Dr. Rodriguez, who is triple-board certified in hematology, oncology and internal medicine. “My work is really very much motivated by how we reach out to underserved communities and increase equity in medicine.”
Dr. Rodriguez is also:
• A longstanding board member of the South Florida American Cancer Society Volunteer Leadership Board
• Co-chair of communications for the Evidence-Based Medicine Committee of the American Association of Clinical Oncology
• Social media editor for the Journal of the National Cancer Institute
• Member of the executive boards of the Dade County Medical Association and the Florida Society of Clinical Oncology, where she works on programs for trainees and women in medicine
Dr. Rodriguez talks more about her work and attention to health equity in the following interview, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you first became interested in medicine.
In my family in Puerto Rico, I witnessed family members with cancer who had poor access to and understanding of their treatment options, even in a country where you can speak the same language. My grandmother had endometrial cancer and my mom and two aunts had breast cancer. Just seeing them through their journey, I really understood how physician communication impacted their cancer. That was important for them. These women are the pillars of my family and the fact that they’re here and they survived cancer inspired me.
What larger lessons did you learn from your family experience that you are taking forward?
I trained in a large city hospital in Brooklyn, serving a large Caribbean community. In this community, I found that, when family members get diagnosed with cancer, it’s common that no one talks about it. There is a lot of stigma and fear. I come from an island where people also commonly don’t talk about cancer or hide it from their family members. Some hide side effects from their doctors or they follow recommendations without understanding them. All of that has really informed what I do as a doctor.
For myself and the doctors around me, it’s important to provide care the community understands so patients comprehend what they’re consenting to and know that they have the right to talk about their side effects or get a second opinion. To see my family go through experiences that were good and bad in limited-resource environments made me very aware that, even in the United States, we have patients who have the same experience and we need to do better for them.
How does your research and emphasis on health equity fit into larger scientific trends in the U.S. and beyond?
In the last few years, there’s definitely more attention to increasing diversity in medicine and collecting information on the impact of social determinants of health. We are now seeing studies coming out of the United States and Europe, where there hadn’t been emphasis on this.
In lung cancer, which impacts large, underserved communities, we are still seeing large clinical trials that are setting treatment standards that still don’t represent the larger population, which may have as low as 2% Hispanic enrollment, for instance. The U.S. National Institutes of Health is now trying to fix that.
Tell us a little bit about Sylvester’s emphasis on ensuring a diverse patient base in its clinical trials.
We pay a lot of attention to enrollment of diverse populations in clinical trials. I’m particularly proud of the work that our experimental therapeutics clinic has done to increase access to innovative, early-phase clinical trials for underserved communities.
I am also proud of the next generation of residents and fellows that we have mentored over the years to work in cancer equity and disparities research. I am proud of the fact that about 50% of our enrollees in our clinical trials are Hispanics and that we are engaging with the Caribbean and Black Afro-Caribbean communities that are also included in our trials.
What are some lessons that outside institutions can take from Sylvester’s success at engaging its diverse service area?
You have to understand the community around you and listen to what their needs are to ask research questions that matter. We have a very strong community engagement department, led by Dr. Erin Kobetz, who is a pioneer in this area. It takes years to build trust and it’s something that is done not only by going into the community, but also by hiring people that are from it, so that you learn from them.
We have a very diverse workforce that understands the community, speaks the languages and understands the culture. That also makes us more effective in enrolling patients in trials and helping them through their cancer journey.
It goes both ways. We learn from the community. We’re here for them but we also need them to be part of the process. There are still a lot of barriers and challenges and we need to find solutions together to improve early diagnosis, screening and innovative clinical trials.
What do you do in your spare time?
I like to exercise by doing CrossFit and I enjoy arts and crafts, in addition to social media reels with my kids. I like to have a time of day when I can stop thinking about work and be creative.
Tags: cancer q and a, cancer research, clinical trials, Dr. Estelamari Rodriguez, Health Equity, lung cancer, Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center