Emily Brill

The goal of the Oncology Care Model is to incentivize high-quality, coordinated care with an episode-based payment model that emphasizes patient access and navigation.

Clinical trials help community practices attract patients, inspire oncologists, and lower costs, but forming a program can be daunting to the uninitiated.

As increasingly pricey therapies come on the market, payers have grown more cautious about issuing payment approvals.

Whether the practice is large, with a boutique staffed by a full-time employee, or small, with an unmanned rack in the waiting room, it isn’t uncommon for a clinic to try selling nonmedical products to patients.

For about a decade, patient portals have been hailed as the wave of the future. However, many still require some work before they reach peak functionality, partly because many patients are reluctant to use them.

Results of a study indicate that 44.7% of practicing oncologists show signs of burnout.

Oncologists discuss their experience and best practices with phone triage programs.

When CMS switched from ICD-9 to ICD-10 last year, the new diagnosis classification list allowed coders to translate additional elements of doctors’ language to billers’ language. However, some coders would like to see that vocabulary expand further, particularly in the area of comorbidities and complications.

The first proton beam therapy units cost huge amounts of money and were well beyond the means of all but the most well-financed cancer centers. However, this technology is vastly cheaper than before.

Oncology practices are facing a new deadline. When October 1 arrives, they will have to start coding with greater specificity and also get used to many new codes that CMS is going to activate.