
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 ...

Focus on the Care Video: Emily Lee Discusses Emerging Payment Models in Cancer Care
Emily Lee, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress (CAP), spoke to us at the NCCS Cancer Policy Roundtable in April of 2014. Lee was a speaker on a panel titled "Bundles or Episodes of Care: Are These Payment Models Workable for Cancer Care?" which discussed the development ...

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 ...

WCOE: Improving Quality for Patients by Delivering and Paying for Care Differently
What Caught Our Eye (WCOE) Each week, we take a closer look at the cancer policy articles, studies, and stories that caught our attention. “We need to change the way we pay for cancer care and almost every other type of care in this country.” In two America Tonight segments entitled, ...

WCOE: Planning for Hospice, Difficult Conversations, and Second Opinions
What Caught Our Eye (WCOE) Each week, we take a closer look at the cancer policy articles, studies, and stories that caught our attention. As avid followers of Susan Gubar’s series in The New York Times on living with cancer, we read her most recent installment, “Living with Cancer: A Tour of Hospice” ...