Clinical Pathways

The authors observed a marked shift toward treatment of higher-risk subsets of younger postmenopausal women (with prior fracture and/or with osteoporosis), and away from women at lower risk.

Universal gene expression profiling of patients with stage II breast cancer resulted in outpatient savings of $11,000 (inclusive of testing costs) within 6 months of initiation of medical therapy.

Currently, clinical guidelines offer little guidance on deintensifying care, which is critical for balancing overuse and underuse of services.

Adherence to clinical guidelines in practice is often suboptimal and controversial. This study compares actual statin utilization and cost with full adoption of major clinical guidelines in a real-world population.

A new pathway uses a multidisciplinary team to help reduce 30-day heart failure readmissions, explained Amar Bhakta, MD, of Rush University Medical Center.

US healthcare spending is on the rise, and is expected to comprise over 20% of the gross domestic product by 2025. Current expenditures are expected to double by 2060 if the pace of spending in the past decade continues. In this healthcare landscape, in vitro diagnostics (IVD) have increasingly become the subject of scrutiny, as IVDs are perceived as contributing to soaring costs.

Including the modified brentuximab antibody in the treatment regimen improved modified progression-free survival by 5%, although the rates of neutropenia and infections were higher in patients administered the brentuximab-containing regimen.

Physician belief in the art of medicine is running up against the challenge of costs being shifted to patients and health systems and the desire of payers to have less variation in care, said Derek Raghavan, MD, PhD, FACP, FRACP, president, Carolinas HealthCare System's Levine Cancer Institute.

WIth different societies and organizations releasing contrary guidelines around breast cancer screening, experience with past patients or friends and family members could influence physicians' decisions around when to start screening mammography.

The FDA has approved Foundation Medicine's FoundationOne CDx, the first-of-a-kind comprehensive companion diagnostic test for solid tumors. The test looks for hundreds of cancer genes, providing healthcare professionals with a more complete picture of what's causing tumor growth and guidance for treatment decisions.

A newly published retrospective study in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery found that lobectomy improved survival in patients with early-stage lung cancer compared with SBRT.

A new tool developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the ECRI Institute will assess the extent to which a guideline adheres to the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) standards for trustworthy evidence-based clinical guidelines.

Chemotherapy and radiation therapy should be the first line of treatment for certain prostate cancers and lymphomas with a major genetic weakness, according to researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

Documenting when a patient falls outside of a recommended pathway has the dual benefits of improving the algorithm and helping a provider get reimbursed faster, explained Torrie K. Fields, MPH, senior program manager of Palliative Care Program Design & Implementation for Blue Shield of California.

High chemotherapy costs are only one reason for the rising cost of cancer care. End-of-life care and hospitalizations are within an oncologist's control and must be better managed given new reimbursement structures.

Reimbursement policy has been a driver of change in the way hospitals handle heart failure patients.

Roche had 2 drugs approved by the FDA—one that is the first approved treatment for a rare blood disease and the other is approved as a first-line treatment for anaplastic lymphoma kinase-positive metastatic non–small cell lung cancer.