Latest Conference Articles

The Community Oncology Alliance (COA) retains the spirit of an upstart advocacy group, while working to look ahead at innovative technologies, care delivery trends, and other events that threaten independent practices, said oncology leaders while attending their annual meeting this week.

In this session at AMCP 2023, speakers broke down the challenges many managed care organizations face when wanting to collect detailed data on health disparities and proffered potential strategies that may help to facilitate gathering these data to address inequitable health care access.

Scott Soefje, PharmD, director of pharmacy cancer care at Mayo Clinic, explains the various ways drug dose rounding can reduce waste, reduce costs, and make drug administration more efficient.

Some challenges linking medication adherence to medical cost offsets include the potential of reverse causality, omitted variable bias, how adherence is measured between studies, and the outdated nature of some of the most-cited literature, said Ben Urick, PharmD, PhD, principal health outcomes researcher at Prime Therapeutics.

On the first full day of conference activity at AMCP 2023, a morning session examined prior authorization (PA) through a lens of refining the current process and the potential role of clinical trial data in PA criteria.

Panelists at the Value-Based Insurance Design Summit discussed ways their organizations are looking to create a better benefit design to promote health equity and address known disparities.

Kashyap Patel, MD, immediate past president of Community Oncology Alliance (COA) and CEO of Carolina Blood and Cancer Care Associates, talks about bringing together different stakeholders in the oncology space in order to benefit patients and providers.

While melanoma is one of the most aggressive cancers, making early detection crucial for outcomes, because it is visible on the surface, there are opportunities to catch it early, said Sancy Leachman, MD, PhD, professor and chair in the Department of Dermatology and director of the Melanoma Research Program at the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health and Science University.

Dermatology lends itself well to telemedicine, particularly as a screening tool to reduce wait times and increase access to care for patients with high-risk melanoma, said Erik Jaklitsch, second-year medical student at the University of Pittsburgh.

Topics to be addressed at the annual conference, which will bring more than 1900 attendees to Kissimmee, Florida, include the Enhancing Oncology Model, efforts to regulate pharmacy benefit managers, and 340B reform.

With both biologics and Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors available to treat atopic dermatitis, providers have more options for patients, said Emma Guttman-Yassky, MD, PhD, FAAD, of Mount Sinai.

In a real-world clinical setting, tildrakizumab demonstrated safety and satisfaction among patients with moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis.

Posters presented at the American Academy of Dermatology 2023 Annual Meeting provided a snapshot of disparities in dermatology care, both in terms of geographic differences in access to care and collection of race/ethnicity data in clinical trials.

A pair of posters presented at the American Academy of Dermatology 2023 Annual Meeting showed the efficacy of ruxolitinib cream in improving symptoms of vitiligo on the face, both as assessed by investigators and by how noticeable the patients felt their vitiligo was.

Using the DataDerm database has uncovered disparities in prescription patterns, but it’s still early in the process of understanding why those disparities might exist, said Robert Dellavalle, MD, PhD, MSPH, and Ramiro Rodriguez, MD, both of University of Colorado School of Medicine.

There are certain considerations when choosing which patient is the best fit for a biologic to treat hidradenitis suppurativa, said Haley Naik, MD, FAAD, associate professor of dermatology, University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine.

Once thought of as the result of an imbalance in bodily humors, inflammatory skin diseases are now understood to arise from types of immune responses, opening the door to targeted therapies and personalized medicine, according to speakers at the American Academy of Dermatology 2023 Annual Meeting.

Treatable skin diseases in the transgender population can be overlooked and not managed, despite how they can negatively impact quality of life, according to researchers.

Amid a packed roster of of late-breaking research at the American Academy of Dermatology 2023 Annual Meeting, investigators presented findings from long-term extensions of the Topical Ruxolitinib Evaluation in Vitiligo phase 3 studies.

Similar to other therapies, approximately 40% of patients with vitiligo who stopped treatment with ruxolitinib cream relapsed, but they achieved repigmentation once treatment was reinitiated, explained John Harris, MD, PhD, FAAD, director of the Vitiligo Clinic and Research Center at UMass Chan Medical School.

Biosimilars may not be perfect, but they are, at the very minimum, helping to make cancer therapies a little bit more accessible, said Andre D. Harvin, PharmD, MS, executive director of pharmacy, oncology, Cone Health.

Speakers at the American Academy of Dermatology 2023 Annual Meeting highlighted the potential of DataDerm to tell the story of dermatological care in the United States, but some also cautioned that the registry only reflects those who have access to care in the first place.

Many people often don’t connect the dots between climate change and its impact on skin health, but these effects have been happening for years, said Eva R. Parker, MD, associate professor of dermatology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

At the American Academy of Dermatology annual meeting there will be multiple presentations on hot topics and the latest advances in microneedling, explained Monica Li, MD, clinical instructor, Department of Dermatology and Skin Science, University of British Columbia.

A symposium at the American Academy of Dermatology 2023 Annual Meeting convened speakers who presented current data on the use of Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors in dermatology, including in atopic dermatitis and vitiligo.

Stephen M. Schleicher, MD, MBA, Tennessee Oncology and Community Oncology Alliance (COA) Board of Directors member, discusses what brings him back to the Community Oncology Conference year after year.

AMCP 2023, taking place March 21-24 in San Antonio, Texas, will feature 6 educational tracks, 3 keynote addresses, and an estimated 4000 managed care professionals in attendance.

This year's Community Oncology Conference will celebrate 2 decades of achievements in community oncology and begin to chart a path forward for the future, said Nicolas Ferreyros, managing director of policy, advocacy, and communications at Community Oncology Alliance (COA).