Dr Todd Yezefski on the Benefits of Financial Navigators in Oncology

Providing financial navigators in cancer centers and hospitals can have demonstrable benefits for both patients and hospitals, explained Todd Yezefski, MD, senior fellow in the Clinical Research Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Division of Medical Oncology at the University of Washington.

Transcript

How can using trained financial navigators have benefits for the patients and the hospitals providing their care?

I think that for patients as they are going through their cancer care, their needing to cover copays and coinsurance and they have medication costs. And financial navigators are able to find assistance for them to help cover some of the costs of their medications and their copays and if patients don’t have insurance or are underinsured, the financial navigators are able to steer them in the right direction and to help them to choose insurance plans that are better suited for their situation. It really is helping them to defray some of those out of pocket costs that they have and allow them to afford care that they may not otherwise get. As far as hospitals, hospitals often times when patients can’t afford care provide it in the form of charity care or write it off as bad debt. However, if they are able to help patients to get assistance programs, to cover the costs of this, they’re getting money in that they would not have gotten otherwise and are able to increase their revenue and rely less on charity care.