Practice Management
Oncology Community Raising Concerns About Utilization Management, PBMs
Utilization management strategies allow payers to manage the cost of healthcare benefits, but according to Ray D. Page, DO, PhD, FACOI, President, the Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders, Weatherford, TX, this practice often leads to burdensome requirements on oncologists and an increased administrative workload. [ Read More ]Top 4 Trends That Are Changing Oncology Practices
What are the most noteworthy trends that can affect an oncology practice’s strategic planning, budgeting, and bottom line? The Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC) partnered with the Advisory Board Company to identify some of those trends in the 2017 Trending Now in Cancer Care Survey. The survey results were presented at the 2018 ACCC Annual Meeting & Cancer Center Business Summit. [ Read More ]Oncology Practice Trends and Pressures
New Orleans, LA—An American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Oncology Practice Trends Survey from 2015 to 2016 revealed that increasing practice or facility expenses, drug pricing, and issues with electronic health records (EHRs) were among the top practice pressures cited by oncologists. [ Read More ]The Limitations of Big Data in Cancer Care
There is little chance of escaping the spell that big data has cast over the healthcare industry. “Anytime you listen to any conference, just about every panel, just about every speaker at some point brings up the idea of the use of data for value based care, for value contracts, for quality measures, for new indications for drugs,” said Brad Hirsch, MD, Senior Medical Director, Flatiron Health, New York, NY, at the Sixth Annual Conference of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care. [ Read More ]Leveraging Clinical Data Through Diagnosis Codes as a Successful Oncology Practice
Strategizing patients by determining which patients and what volume of patients will require the most resources is essential to positioning your practice for a successful future. Any business model would identify the needs of a population before defining what services should be brought to a given area, and medical practices should follow suit. [ Read More ]Foundation Medicine and Other Catagories
At this point, Foundation Medicine is exclusively an oncology company, but our next-generation sequencing technique, which can deep sequence hundreds of genes with world?class laboratory capability and world?class computational biology capability, certainly has potential applicability. Immunotherapy comes to mind. Immunotherapy, [ Read More ]
Practice & Clinical Managers’ Role
According to Vicki Kennedy, practice and clinical managers can play a vital role in identifying patient needs and in providing information about resources available to patients. Practice and clinical managers can help bring resource information into the practice and make [ Read More ]
Cost-Effectiveness Analysis Shows Specialty Drugs Offer Value Despite High Cost
Despite substantially higher costs, specialty drugs can offer value comparable with that of traditional medications under certain circumstances, according to a recent cost-effectiveness analysis covering 12 years of FDA drug approvals (Chambers JD, et al. Health Aff [Millwood]. 2014;33:1751-1760). Specialty [ Read More ]
The New Oncology Care Management Model
We all have a variety of reasons for entering the nursing profession. My wish to be an oncology nurse developed from a desire to be challenged by new situations each day. In the more than 25 years during my tenure [ Read More ]