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The Patient-Centered Oncology Care 2014 meeting started off with a talk by Marian Grant, DNP, RN, CRNP, of the University of Maryland School of Nursing, on the topic of palliative care. Although palliative care is appropriate for patients of all ages and in any stage of a serious illness and can be provided alongside curative or disease-modifying treatments, she says she often gets called in very late to offer palliative care to patients.

In 2 interviews with Physicians' Education Resource, LLC, award-winning journalist Joan Lunden and Patrick I. Borgen, MD, of Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY, discuss breast cancer in advance of the 32nd Annual Miami Breast Cancer Conference.

The retrospective analysis conducted in stage 3 and 4 immunotherapy-treated melanoma patients found that the development of vitiligo could serve as a clinical marker for effective antimelanoma immunity and improved clinical outcome.

The proposed federal guidelines are currently open for feedback are calling for greater transparency with informed consent and CER, which might stifle innovation, according to some advocacy groups.

CMO Steven Miller has already started working with oncologists as the company plans the process of steering physicians to use preferred drugs.

A telehealth intervention experiment in head and neck cancer patients was found to relive some posttreatment distress symptoms.

Analysis of State Health Innovation Plans, funded by CMS, shows a variety of emerging approaches to healthcare reform. Accenture has identified the top 5 projected investment areas.

The Affordable Care Act's mandate to increase Medicaid reimbursement to primary care providers has improved access to care for Medicaid enrollees, according to analysis of early evidence published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Medicare is giving bonuses to a majority of hospitals that it graded on quality, but many of those rewards will be wiped out by penalties the government has issued for other shortcomings, federal data show.

Iowa's unique brand of Medicaid expansion and its efforts to improve mental health delivery gained notice in 2014. The announcement this week had few details except that it seeks to save $51.3 million in first half of 2016.

With healthcare payers increasingly relying on narrow provider networks to contain costs and achieve quality, California regulators are pressing health plans to blunt out-of-network costs and maintain accurate provider directories.

A study conducted in Connecticut showed that ultrasound identified an additional 3.2 women in a 1000 with breast cancer, following a negative mammogram. This has raised a debate on the utility of a screening ultrasound.

Newly elected Arkansas Gov Asa Hutchinson said he wants to continue the state's Medicaid expansion compromise through December 31, 2016, but he is keeping his options open for a new plan in the future.

The study found an increased risk of cancer, contradicting some earlier evidence that suggests the opposite.

In Tuesday night's State of the Union address, President Barack Obama did not spend a lot of time discussing healthcare, but he did highlight medical research and a growing field of medicine by announcing his new Precision Medicine Initiative.

The new Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee says the GOP will chip away at Obamacare "piece by piece." Still, he says he will work with Democrats to continue funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program and overhauling Medicare pay for doctors.

Merck this week notified the FDA that it will stop selling its Victrelis medicine in the US by the end of this year, although the drug will remain available in other countries.

A major technical partner is announced for the long-awaited HIT initiative that will give oncologists a data-derived "second opinion" right from their desktops, with the earliest versions scheduled to come online this year.

Karyl Blaseg, RN, MS, OCN, writes about the important role of patient navigators in preventing healthcare disparities and promoting patient-centered care among cancer patients.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has created the new position of chief health information officer, which will be filled by Michael James McCoy, MD.

Existing cancer therapies are geared toward massacring tumor cells, but researchers propose a different strategy: subtly hardening cancer cells to prevent them from invading new areas of the body. They devised a way of screening compounds for the desired effect and have identified a compound that shows promise in fighting pancreatic cancer.

The meta-analysis published today and an accompanying editorial should serve as a wake-up call for healthcare organizations about the costs of caring for aging populations that have spent much of their lives behind desks and watching TV.

Working collaboratively leads to more accurate diagnoses and may help reduce medical errors, according to a study published in JAMA.

In it's report, "Clinical Cancer Advances 2015: ASCO's Annual Report on Progress Against Cancer," published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, 4 newly approved treatments for CLL were predicted to have a dramatic impact on patients with the disease.

A little-known side to the government's health insurance website is prompting renewed concerns about privacy, just as the White House is calling for stronger cybersecurity protections for consumers.

The study conducted at the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology studied IncRNAs and their role in cancer.

Although the healthcare sector will hire at a faster pace in 2015, the outlook for growth in hospital employment is modest, at best.

When discharge summaries contain detailed information and are sent quickly to primary care physicians, they can help reduce hospital readmissions, according to studies from researchers at Yale School of Medicine.

The CEO of Kite Pharma plans to initiate early conversations with insurers, even before the launch of a clinical trial of their experimental drug, to ensure smooth sailing once the product is approved and launched.

Researchers at the University of Maryland are evaluating the value of a person's spit to screen for lung cancer, replacing the traditional and recently recommended CT scan.