
WCOE: Paying Doctors to Talk About End-of-Life Care
What Caught Our Eye (WCOE) Each week, we take a closer look at the cancer policy articles, studies, and stories that caught our attention. “Five years after it exploded into a political conflagration over ‘death panels,’ the issue of paying doctors to talk to patients about end-of-life care is making a ...

WCOE: Patient Empowerment in Discussing End-of-Life Care
What Caught Our Eye (WCOE) Each week, we take a closer look at the cancer policy articles, studies, and stories that caught our attention. In Elana Gordon’s segment with NPR titled, “Hello, May I Help You Plan Your Final Months?” she reports on the work of Vital Decisions, a company that provides ...

WCOE: Challenges of Care Coordination in a Fragmented Health Care System
What Caught Our Eye (WCOE) Each week, we take a closer look at the cancer policy articles, studies, and stories that caught our attention. Several articles caught our eye this week about the complexities of our reimbursement system and the lack of incentives in our current system for the kind of ...

The Difficult Question of When to Stop Treatment
Yesterday, I stumbled across the Twitter chat #whentostop, hosted by the Oncology Nursing Society (ONS), addressing one of the most difficult questions anyone with cancer has to face: when is it time to stop treatment? I am new to Twitter chats, though I have lurked during the Healthcare Leader (#hcldr) and the Breast Cancer Social Media ...

WCOE: Different Treatment Options Require Consideration of Patient Preferences, and What We Can Learn from Price Transparency in Veterinary Medicine
What Caught Our Eye (WCOE) Each week, we take a closer look at the cancer policy articles, studies, and stories that caught our attention. In “Breast Cancer Chemotherapy Varies Widely: Study Raises Questions About Early Treatment Choices,” Dr. Elaine Schattner, contributor to Forbes, directs readers to a recently released study that ...

Addressing the Gaps in Treatment Planning and Coordination with the PACT Act (H.R. 2477)
Recently we were reminded of the importance of the Planning Actively for Cancer Treatment (PACT) Act, H.R. 2477 as we participated in the Lymphoma Research Foundation’s (LRF) Lymphoma Education and Advocacy Partners (LEAP) webinar focused on survivorship and care coordination. NCCS has identified the PACT Act as one of our ...

WCOE: Making Hard Choices and the Impact of Price Transparency
What Caught Our Eye (WCOE) Each week, we take a closer look at the cancer policy articles, studies, and stories that caught our attention. Some physicians are reluctant to answer the question, “What would you do if you were in my shoes?” In “Living with Cancer: Difficult Choices,” another installment in ...

Reinventing Patient-Centered Cancer Care Brookings Institute “MEDTalk”
On Wednesday, as part of the Merkin Series on Innovation in Care Delivery, the Brookings Institute held an event in their new MEDTalk format titled, Reinventing Patient-Centered Cancer Care. The MEDTalk event follows the popular TED Talk format, and it was designed to feature several short presentations that considered the challenges of delivering oncology care ...

WCOE: Patient-Centered Care, “The Fault in Our Stars” and Genetic Data
What Caught Our Eye (WCOE) Each week, we take a closer look at the cancer policy articles, studies, and stories that caught our attention. "A focus on the patient and support for continued progress needs to be part of the equation." Three articles caught our eye at NCCS this week. The ...

Meeting Consumer Expectations and Health Needs in the New Health Insurance Exchanges
Cancer Policy Matters Guest Post by Tanisha Carino, Executive Vice President, Avalere Health The Affordable Care Act provides an unprecedented opportunity for millions to gain coverage through the exchange marketplace by enrolling in a qualified health plan (QHP) that covers essential health benefits and limits financial exposure to excessive out-of-pocket ...