Greg D. Judy, MD, of UNC Health Care, discusses the contributing factors, and possible fixes, for near-miss and actual safety incidents in patients being treated with radiotherapy.
Thomas J. Smith, MD, of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, summarizes two papers for which he was a discussant: reducing overuse of colony-stimulating factors without compromising the safety of patients with lung cancer receiving chemotherapy, and a cost-and-survival analysis before and after implementing Dana-Farber Clinical Pathways for patients with stage IV non–small cell lung cancer (Abstracts 3, 52).
Robert S. Miller, MD, of ASCO, updates the progress of CancerLinQ and its data set, now being used by oncologists to track quality measurement and reporting.
Caleb Dulaney, MD, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, discusses ways to broaden and improve the quality of information that women with breast cancer find—in English and Spanish—on websites of nationally recognized cancer centers (Abstract 135).
Brian Weiss, MD, of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, discusses a program designed to eliminate errors in chemotherapy use among pediatric patients whose regimens incorporate multiple drugs and rigorous monitoring schedules (Abstract 37).
Ethan M. Basch, MD, of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discusses programs—now rolling out at various institutions—that use direct patient reporting of symptoms as a part of quality assessment (Posters 61, 81; Abstract 218).
