December 2016

Keeping a medical practice strong and independent in today’s turbulent environment can be quite challenging.

It is almost unimaginable. Oncologists have waited for decades to offer their patients a better chance of surviving cancer, and now they can—for multiple cancer types.

The final rule for the Quality Payment Program authorized by the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 was recently released.

Delivering patient-centered care is not an easy task in an increasingly complex environment, participants at the 4th Annual Institute for the Future of Oncology concluded at the June meeting.

Many things are happening with payer practices as a result of the plethora of new immuno-oncology agents.

When a leading pharmacy benefit manager, CVS Caremark, announced in August that it would stop covering prescriptions at physician dispensaries for patients with Medicare Part D drug coverage, it fell to practice staffers like Tommy Harwood to deal with the resulting consternation.

It was 15 years ago that Jeffrey Brenner, MD, hypothesized that patients with the highest costs in the Camden, New Jersey, healthcare system received the worst care.

Value-based reforms from CMS have been received like extra work at the end of a long hard day. It hasn’t helped that making the leap to patient-centered care has involved grappling with a new set of quality metrics and wringing higher levels of performance out of electronic health reporting systems.

A test that may be considered beyond next generation in the oncological disease testing market is getting a trial run from Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey with help from a growing patient database known as COTA.