Sarah S. Mougalian, MD, of Yale Cancer Center, discusses the increasingly common problem of long wait times for access to oncology care. Her team developed a next-day access program in several of Yale’s oncology services, which was well received by patients and decreased the time to first visit.
Divya A. Parikh, MD, of Stanford University School of Medicine, discusses findings that suggest an evidence-based tool, the Serious Illness Conversation Guide, may engage patients with metastatic or recurrent urologic cancer in goals-of-care conversations, potentially resulting in an increase of documentation of their goals in the electronic medical record.
Jenny Jing Xiang, MD, of Yale University School of Medicine, discusses a universal, standardized clinical trial prescreening protocol, which streamlined research recruitment and was associated with yearly increases in patient enrollment at the Veterans Administration (VA) Connecticut Cancer Center. The Center became the top-accruing VA site for National Cancer Institute–sponsored trials and was ranked in the top 10 enrolling sites nationally for VA and non-VA hospitals.
Tina Shih, PhD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses the rising cost-sharing requirement from private insurance, which has worsened the financial burden for patients with cancer. She believes that cost-containment policies alone may not be enough to ease this hardship.
Manali I. Patel, MD, MPH, of Stanford University School of Medicine, discusses data suggesting that community health workers and innovative payer models can better engage low-income and minority patients with cancer, improve their health-related quality of life, and reduce unwanted and unnecessary acute care.
Leticia Nogueira, PhD, MPH, of the American Cancer Society, discusses results from a study designed to evaluate the impact of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In Medicaid-expansion states, mortality among patients after lung cancer surgery decreased from 2.4% before the ACA to 0.8% after the ACA, with no significant change in non–Medicaid-expansion states.
