Practice & Policy

Developing an effective personal and professional self-care plan can help oncologists deal with the pressures of caring for terminally ill patients and potentially prevent burnout, a recent study suggests.

The Supreme Court announced a unanimous 9-0 decision that genes cannot be patented. After a long legal battle, the high court ruled against Myriad’s patents on two breast cancer susceptibility genes—BRCA1 and BRCA2—declaring that genes are products of nature and cannot be treated as inventions.

Now is a critical moment for all involved in caring for cancer patients to engage in this national policy debate; numerous cancer advocacy organizations have already joined the effort to oppose the sequester cuts to oncology drugs.

A group of experts say that cancer drug prices, especially those for chronic myeloid leukemia, have skyrocketed, making patient treatment extremely difficult.

Four of the nation’s cancer organizations--including the COA and ASCO--believe that the sequestration cuts will impact the treatment of cancer patients on Medicare and have sent letters to Congress and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Oncologists hit by sequester budget cuts to the cost of purchasing and administering cancer drugs are hoping that the potentially devastating impact on Medicare cancer patients will force a quick legislative fix in Congress.

New guidelines make recommendations on how physicians should conduct themselves online, examining the effect of Facebook and Twitter on patient-physician relationships.

Just as high-quality research has focused on limiting the physical toxicity resulting from successful treatment, future research should focus on mitigating the negative effects of financial toxicity without affecting disease-related outcomes.

My practice has been concerned that we physicians were not maximizing our “coding potential”; that is, we were not receiving as much remuneration for each cancer patient visit as Medicare permits under its guidelines. Therefore, the practice hired a company that specializes in teaching physicians how to get more. This company is part of a newly minted industry that does nothing else.

In this interview we discuss the dissemination of research results, clinical trials, and other oncology news using social media, as well as what type of media oncologists use, and how useful and relevant this type of information is for most oncologists.

In this interview we discuss HPV-associated cancers, which are on the rise, and the low vaccination coverage for HPV with Edgar Simard, PhD, MPH, senior epidemiologist of surveillance research, who studies the impact of prevention and screening on cancer incidence at the American Cancer Society.

Costs of care continue to rise; new cancer drugs are more expensive than ever before, and more patients are being treated with these drugs. While patients and claims datasets consistently report an association between financial burden and quality of care, the impact on traditional disease-related outcomes—survival, for example—have not been assessed.

The annual report to the nation on the status of cancer in the United States, published Monday, shows cancer death rates overall continue to decline. The number of people who die as a result of their cancer has been steadily declining since the 1990s, and over the 9-year period between 2000 and 2009, the report shows a 1.8% decrease in death rates per year among men and a 1.4% decrease among women.

The Come Home project will demonstrate that community oncology practices can aggressively manage the symptoms and complications of cancer and its treatment—and at the same time can save money by limiting the use of expensive sites of service like hospitals and emergency departments.

In Part II, I focus on ideas and specific programs that may slow the growth of spending while, it is hoped, minimizing the impact on what we all want: sustainable access to high-quality therapy and continued innovation. Finally, I will consider another fundamental question: Is current spending worth it?
• The War on Waste
• Cost of Cancer: There Is More to It Than Containing Chemotherapy Costs