Oncology

An artificial intelligence system can digest what would take a person 29 hours to read in about 30 seconds, so everything is right in front of providers at the point of care, says Barry Russo, chief executive officer of The Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders.

During a session at Asembia’s 15th annual Specialty Pharmacy Summit, Greg Simon, president, Biden Cancer Initiative, outlined commitments that came out of the Cancer Moonshot, the work of the Biden Cancer Initiative, and ongoing challenges that patients with cancer face.

New technologies are enabling pharmacists to play a bigger role in managing overall care delivery and the cost of care for patients with cancer, explained Matt Farber, MA, senior director of Patient Care and Advocacy for Walgreens.

Stephen Grubbs, MD, vice president of clinical affairs at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, explains what stakeholders can expect from the new updates to the Patient-Centered Oncology Payment (PCOP) model, as well as some key differences between PCOP and the Oncology Care Model.

Blase Polite, MD, associate professor of medicine and the executive director for accountable care at the University of Chicago, discusses why he chose to focus on the state of the Oncology Care Model at the April 25 meeting of the Institute for Value-Based Medicine.

The oncology drug pipeline has experienced rapid growth over the past decade, driven by innovation in cell therapies, immunotherapy, and precision medicine, according to a specialty pipeline update presentation at Asembia's 15th annual Specialty Pharmacy Summit, held April 29 to May 2 in Las Vegas.

Payers, providers, and other stakeholders have to come together to figure out how to make a better patient member experience for those who are fighting cancer, said Bryan Loy, MD, physician lead, oncology, laboratory, and personalized medicine, Humana.

The standard treatment isn’t always right for everyone, and part of a social worker’s job as a member of the care team is to understand the patient’s goals and what treatment is the right fit for them, said Abra Kelson, MSW, LSWA-IC, medical social work supervisor, Northwest Medical Specialties.

CancerIQ has automated a lot of time-consuming steps to allow operationally efficient community cancer centers a way of offering genetic screening in a profitable manner, said Feyi Olopade Ayodele, MBA, chief executive officer at CancerIQ.

Implementing new payment models is really complicated, and the private sector is not doing as much as the public sector, said Michael Kolodziej, MD, vice president and chief innovation officer at ADVI Health, Inc.

Taking care of a patient in the shift to value-based care means utilizing care managers to answer questions when the physician isn’t available, says Beth Wittmer, RN, OCN, manager of care management at Florida Cancer Specialists and Research Institute.

Every week, The American Journal of Managed Care® recaps the top managed care news of the week, and you can now listen to it on our podcast, Managed Care Cast.

https://www.pharmacytimes.org/on-demand/the-era-of-parp-inhibition-in-cancer-management-patient-selection-and-deciding-when-to-use-in-treatment-enduring

AJMCtv® interviews let you catch up with experts on what’s new and important about changes in healthcare. The interviews provide insights from key decision makers-from the clinician to the health plan leader to the regulator. When every minute in your day matters, AJMCtv® interviews keep you informed. You can access the video clips at www.ajmc.com/interviews.

Managed care updates.

Regulatory and clinical updates.

When breast cancer spreads, it often goes to the bones, and new research has found that exposure to dim light at night may contribute to this spread. Results from the animal study were presented at ENDO 2019, the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society.

Conference coverage updates from the Community Oncology Alliance's annual meeting.

Updates from the Association of Community Cancer Centers annual meeting.

Policy updates from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network's annual meeting.

Clinical updates from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network's annual meeting.

We learned that a true patient-centered approach would be a combination of objective, numerical, centripetal measures defined in the Oncology Care Model (OCM) and subjective centrifugal emotions, aspirations, and expectations. We created smart teams, enabling an efficient transition from volume to value. These exercises were similar to building a higher pyramid on top of what we already achieved during our journey toward Patient-Centered Speciality Practice (PCSP) accreditation by the the National Committee for Quality Assurance in 2015. Although the transition to being a PCSP was speciality agnostic and truly patient centric, the OCM gave us a blueprint that was specific to the needs of PCCC.

In an article published in Electronics Magazine on April 9, 1965, Intel cofounder Gordon Earle Moore noted that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubled every year. He extrapolated that this rate of growth in computing power would continue to double every 2 years throughout the late 1960s and in to the 1970s and 1980s. The prediction, which became known as Moore’s Law, proved prescient. Intel and other industry leaders took this as both a prediction for the pace of innovation and a push for the industry to create “computing [that] would dramatically increase in power, and decrease in relative cost, at an exponential pace.” From 1965 to today, the technologies, depth of innovation, and corresponding impact from discoveries made in the pursuit of achieving and sustaining Moore’s vision have affected our lives in profound and unexpected days. Conversations rarely take place today without someone glancing at a smartphone to close a business deal, to let family know they will be late, or to post pictures of the conversation on a social media site.

Academic medical centers and a group representing community oncology practices have both raised concerns about CMS’ proposed reimbursement plan for chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, the individually manufactured gene treatments that are revolutionizing cancer care. The plan will be finalized next month, a year after the federal government launched a national coverage analysis to determine how to pay for these lifesaving yet expensive cancer treatments.

Patients with hematologic malignancy who are undergoing chemotherapy or a conditioning regimen for hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) are at high risk of infection because of the severity and duration of neutropenia. Fever with neutropenia is a common presentation that suggests an infection leading to empiric antibacterial therapy. To prevent infection and thus the neutropenic fever, antibacterial prophylaxis, especially with fluoroquinolones, emerged as a common practice based on results of 2 randomized controlled trials published in 2005 that showed reduced incidence of fever and bacteremia despite lack of a mortality benefit.