Genomic Profiling Yields OS Benefit for Patients With Targeted Therapy Matches
June 4th 2017Comprehensive genomic testing is not yet widespread, but a French study presented at the 2017 ASCO Annual Meeting suggested that DNA profiling can be of important value in advancing personalized medicine.
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ASCO 2017: Same-Day Dosing Cuts Costs
May 26th 2017Researchers achieved cost savings and cut down on the amount of drug they had to throw away by pooling drug vials and dosing all patients with a given disease on the same day of the week, according to data released ahead of the 2017 ASCO Annual Meeting.
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A Boot Camp Opens for Oncology Financial Navigators
May 18th 2017Clara N. Lambert and the Association of Community Cancer Centers have created an online course called Financial Advocacy Boot Camp, which is designed to give experienced and novice financial navigators a review of essential knowledge for finding patient funds.
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Practices Rush to Prepare for USP
May 9th 2017Terra Universal, an environmental solutions company based in Fullerton, California, came to a point recently where it was no longer willing to sell and design clean-room setups for oncology practices unless potential clients first sat down with a consultant who could give them reliable guidance on what they needed.
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Experts Share Lessons Learned in OCM Adoption Process
May 2nd 2017The rollout of the Oncology Care Model from CMS has proven to be a challenging road, specifically involving technological challenges, as practices have scrambled to find seamless solutions to bridging old electronic health records with new "patches" designed for the OCM.
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COA Highlights Concern Over Growing Influence of PBMs
April 28th 2017Josh Cox, PharmD, moderated a panel discussion on legislative initiatives to combat the rising power of Pharmacy Benefit Managers at the 2017 Community Oncology Conference. In the talk, he touched on the difficulties of monitoring therapy for patients receiving their drugs from outside pharmacies as well as murkiness off drug pricing and cash flow within the PBM systems.
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COA Slams MedPAC's Drug Cost Containment Plan
April 12th 2017A set of draft recommendations for controlling price escalation in the Medicare Part B program has ignited fresh concern from the oncology community, which battled last year to overcome the Medicare Part B Drug Payment Model cost reduction experiment.
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Atezolizumab Yields Long-Term OS in mTNBC Subset
April 3rd 2017According to results presented at the 2017 AACR Annual Meeting, 10% of patients showed impressive long-term survival in a phase I study of single agent anti-PD-L1 atezolizumab (Tecentriq) in patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer.
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ACCC Calls for Vigilance Despite Repeal Failure
March 30th 2017The Republican-led Affordable Care Act repeal and replace effort has the potential to be revived, but majority leaders may not want to risk further political capital in a battle that could go against them, speakers said at this year's Association of Community Cancer Centers' CANCERSCAPE annual conference.
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ASCO Fights Perception That Independents Get Short Shrift
March 30th 2017Daniel F. Hayes, MD, and Stephen S. Grubbs, MD, discuss the perception that ASCO has not been truly representative of smaller, independent oncology practices throughout the United States, and how they plan to remedy that.
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ASCO Highlights Challenges, Hope in State of Cancer Care Report
March 22nd 2017The Affordable Care Act has improved access to cancer care for millions of Americans, and many new drugs and new indications for existing cancer drugs were approved in 2016, but there are frontiers in improving cancer care that include information barriers, disparities in the availability of rural care, and stressors on physicians and oncology practices, ASCO said in its annual report State of Cancer Care in America: 2017.
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ASCO, ASH Speak Out Against Proposed NIH Funding Cut
March 17th 2017President Donald Trump has called his fiscal year 2018 budget proposal a "blueprint for making America great again," but oncological societies have been quick to denounce the budget plan, released Thursday, March 16, as a huge potential setback to health efforts in general and specifically to the fight against cancer.
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Sandra Lee States Her Reasons for Bilateral Mastectomy
March 12th 2017For television personality, author, and lifestyle maven Sandra Lee the roots of her controversial decision to have a bilateral mastectomy go back to her childhood, when her grandmother was diagnosed with an advanced and aggressive form of stomach cancer.
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Butterfly Effect May Foil Genomic Medicine
March 11th 2017The so-called butterfly effect, in which a small creature can cause something on the scale of an earthquake merely by flapping its wings, is fodder for debate on whether the digital revolution in medicine can deliver on its promise for precision medicine.
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