June 2016

At the annual meeting of The Community Oncology Alliance, oncologists sat through a crash course on biosimilars that was rendered by experts from the pharmaceutical industry.

At The Community Oncology Conference: Innovation in Cancer Care, oncologists discussed how their practices are coping with the transition toward quality- and value-based reimbursement.

Representatives from 3 clinics that successfully participated in the accreditation process for an Oncology Medical Home, participated on a panel at The Community Oncology Conference: Innovation in Cancer Care.

An expert panel at The Community Oncology Conference: Innovation in Cancer Care, held in Orlando, Florida, April 13-15, 2016, provided insight on current transitions in healthcare reform, and their predictions for the future.

Despite the breadth of metrics, there seems to be a significant disconnect between the relatively prosaic, process-based measures that largely dominate our quality portfolio and the high-level, aspiration-driven demands of delivering increasingly complex care to patients with cancer.

Improving the healthcare services that an organization provides can be challenging unless one gathers information on the service, collates it, improves on it, and implements the changes in the field. A panel of experts invited by Evidence-Based Oncology discussed processes that help identify the most valuable metrics and the importance of making them relevant for use in the clinic.

Advances in cancer treatment provide more options for patients but add complexity to treatment decisions. HealthHelp’s Integrative Oncology program coordinates care to maximize efficiency and ensure optimal outcomes for cancer patients.

CancerLinQ is a big data platform developed by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) that aggregates clinical data from electronic health records for quality benchmarking and hypothesis generation. Such observational data can complement traditional evidence but must be used with caution.

CMS has developed the Oncology Care Model (OCM) to provide physician practices that furnish chemotherapy treatment the option of payment arrangements that include financial and performance accountability for episodes of care for cancer patients. This article presents an overview of the model and guidelines that can help meet the quality and performance measures for OCM participation.

The National Quality Forum (NQF) Measure Incubator provides a platform for the development of patient-reported outcome performance measures in palliative cancer care, which is essential to understanding a cancer patient’s functional status and well being.

As cancer care stakeholders move through processes of creating, deploying, and reporting quality metrics, it is important to remember that these measures alone are not sufficient to bring better care to patients.

The field of measurement in Mycosis Fungoides/Sézary syndrome type cutaneous T-cell lymphoma lacked a specific quality-of-life measure to describe patient experience or guide treatment decisions. Using an online platform with an engaged patient community, we developed and psychometrically validated a new measure in just under a year.