Practice & Policy

We presented an interactive session entitled “Using Social Media in Oncology for Education and Patient Engagement” at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2012 Annual Meeting. This article summarizes the points made in those presentations.

I have come to the conclusion that a successful systematic approach to earlier transitions from disease-directed cancer therapy to end-of-life and palliative care can only come from better communication in the context of more trusting relationships.

Chemotherapy regimens that 10 years ago cost $30,000 have now increased ten-fold. Could a new research facility help make cancer care affordable again?

CancerNetwork speaks with two practicing oncologists about how the recent Supreme Court decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act will affect oncology practices and patients.

ICD-10 is a massive undertaking that expands our current 13,000 codes to 68,000 codes. It will impact nearly all business processes in a physician's practice: verification of eligibility, pre-authorization, clinical documentation, research activities, public health reporting, quality reporting, and claim submission.

For independent physician practices, the realities of overhead expenses, time available for patient care, and regulatory requirements can only be assessed when the specific requirements for reporting and reimbursement are clear.

For oncologists, the impact of the Supreme Court's decision on the Affordable Care Act will likely mean that their patients will no longer be in danger of losing insurance or being denied insurance because of cancer.

How will we deal with patients and families who, given their tremendous access to information, learn about and demand expensive (and up until now reasonable) treatments once we have recast them as too expensive to justify their marginal benefits? Are we prepared to engage in such discussions directly?

My thought is that it is good to move forward. No doubt there will be needed changes, but the status quo is broken.

This will have a significant impact on medicine and on the care we will be able to deliver. It has life and death implications. The patients of America, who have enjoyed the best healthcare in the world, have lost.

As with any legislation, there are both positive and negative aspects. Specific to oncology, one of the greatest impacts of the ACA will be the move to a bundled payment for a treatment of a disease.

I think it is a real shame that inside the Beltway, both sides of the political arena have had neither the wisdom nor the courage to recognize and address the fact that medicolegal drivers will continue to push costs upward until someone takes the lead in tackling this issue.

Pertuzumab has been approved in combination with trastuzumab (Herceptin) and docetaxel chemotherapy for women whose breast cancer overexpress the HER2 receptor and who have not received prior systemic treatment.

The proposition that a consumer smartphone could somehow become part of the diagnostic toolkit of an oncologist may seem ridiculous. There are, however, many researchers and start-ups that would disagree.

In this article we provide a summary of the questions under consideration by the Supreme Court regarding the health care reform legislation, and we explore how the pending decision on this high-profile matter may impact the oncology community.