Closing Gaps in Value-Based Cancer Care

Linda Bosserman, MD, PhD, FASCO, FACP, medical oncologist and professor at City of Hope, identifies key gaps in value-based cancer care, emphasizing the need to balance cost and care to improve patient outcomes and quality of life.

She discussed this topic at length during her presentation, "Challenges of Providing Therapeutic Excellence in Our Current System," at the Institute for Value-Based Medicine (IVBM)^® event last week in Garden Grove, California.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Transcript

What gaps in the current value-based care models affect the delivery of cutting-edge therapies to patients with cancer? How can these gaps be addressed?

There are significant gaps in patients receiving high-quality personalized cancer care across the country. Some of those challenges are insurance barriers that prevent patients from getting second opinions from experts with the most knowledge about their disease and the best clinical trials that will offer new treatments that can improve outcomes. New molecular testing, it's essential that patients' tumors are tested and that patients who have inherited malignancies have those tested so their treatment plan can be comprehensive from the beginning.

In patients that have barriers, either transportation, local access, or insurance barriers to getting second opinions or opinions at centers where there are experts that can work with their local doctors, that prevents people from getting the best cancer care and thus the best survival and treatment benefits.

One of the barriers is people really understanding what value is, and it's not just the lowest cost. It's ensuring the patient has the proper diagnosis, treatment, care, and support so that you have high patient satisfaction. But you also need to have high staff satisfaction because they want to provide the best care and have the time, tools, networking, teams, and partnerships so that they know they're offering the best care to their patient.

We need our health system to be sustainable, both for payers and society. Balancing that gets you to the best outcome for the best cost. It doesn't mean the lowest cost, it means the right cost to get the proper care so that patients can have their best survival and their best quality of life after a cancer diagnosis.