Kerin B. Adelson, MD, of the Yale Cancer Center, discusses the major healthcare cost drivers at the end of life—aggressive treatments, emergency room visits, and futile care—and strategies for improving value. (Abstract 3)
Randall F. Holcombe, MD, of the Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine, discusses the challenges of delivering quality care in an academic setting at a large hospital.
Allison Kurian, MD, of Stanford University School of Medicine, discusses pressing questions about the clinical utility and value of extended genomic testing and other forms of precision medicine.
Joseph V. Simone, MD, of the Simone Consulting Company, reflects on the prospects for the future of safety and quality.
Kerin B. Adelson, MD, of the Yale Cancer Center, discusses an electronic decision support tool to capture staging data. This information allows automated reports for clinical trial screening, outcomes analysis, quality comparisons, and reporting. (Abstract 151)
Sandra L. Wong, MD, of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, summarizes three abstracts for which she was the discussant. The topics were rates of surgical site infections, an online resource for hospital cancer surgery volumes, and barriers to oncology appointments at comprehensive cancer centers. (Abstracts 171, 172, 55)
