Study Raises Questions & Choices for Women Screening for Breast Cancer
Several articles published on Tuesday, February 11, reported on a study in the British Medical Journal which finds death rates from breast cancer from all causes were the same in women who got mammograms and those who did not. The articles points out that the screening also had consequential effects when mammograms detected ...
NCCS Responds to Recent Data on Childhood Cancer Survivorship Issues
A recent edition of the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) has attracted our attention for the disturbing statistics it revealed about the issues related to the acceleration of aging among adult survivors of childhood cancer. For 27 years, the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship (NCCS) has focused on patient-centered policy ...
NCCS 2013 Quality Cancer Care Timeline of Accomplishments
In 2013, the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship (NCCS) represented the patient perspective in national meetings, convened policy experts and thought leaders, submitted comments on federal policies, developed tools to address gaps in cancer care planning, advocated for quality cancer care, and championed legislation that would give Medicare beneficiaries access to ...
NCCS Policy Comments: Rewarding Quality of Care Among Other Measures in SGR Legislative Proposal
NCCS submitted comments to the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways & Means Committee on a draft proposal to repeal the sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula and reform Medicare physician payment system. NCCS commended the committees on developing a bipartisan, bicameral approach that would reward quality of care instead ...
Shared Decision Making to Improve Care and Reduce Costs
In a New England Journal of Medicine January 3, 2013 article, Emily Oshima Lee and Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel discuss the potential for shared decision making to improve the quality of care patients receive and potentially reduce costs. The authors suggest that a provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) ...
NCCS sponsors IOM study to demographic issues in quality of cancer care
NCCS, along with 11 other organizations sponsored an Institute of Medicine (IOM) consensus study: Improving the Quality of Cancer Care: Addressing the Challenges of an Aging Population. On May 21, 2012, the committee began to examine issues in the quality of cancer care with a specific focus on the demographic changes ...
Focus on quality of life may cut health-care costs
A new focus on patient well being and quality-of-life issues could improve health-care outcomes and reduce costs, as WSJ explains in today’s special report on innovation in health care. Well-being and quality of life may seem like fairly vague concepts for doctors, compared to say, blood-pressure readings and cholesterol levels ...
HHS reaches important milestone for cancer survivors, consumers and small businesses seeking comprehensive and affordable health insurance coverage
On March 12, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released the final rule governing the health insurance “exchanges.” As NCCS indicated in its comments on the proposed rule, HHS’ guidance on this topic represents an important milestone in the establishment of a marketplace in which consumers and small ...
Can patients refuse medical treatment?
A woman named Sheryl (not her real name) contacted me recently with a question that seemed rather simple on its face, and turned out to be far more complex. She is 60 years old and has a terminal disease, for which treatment will be debilitating and possibly painful. She has ...
