Articles

Approximately 77,000 healthcare providers have already registered by July of this year with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for the electronic health records (EHRs) program.

Evidence-based medicine and a focused clinical orientation are key elements to delivering the right care at the right time to the right person. The recent findings reported at the 2011 American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting regarding the use of novel therapies and strategies in the treatment of non–small-cell lung cancer make achieving these goals harder than ever.

The development of ipilimumab (Yervoy) and its approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in March 2011 have opened a new era in the treatment and management of patients with metastatic melanoma.

Medicare may be paying for more screening colonos - copies than are warranted for the prevention of colorectal cancer (CRC), according to a new study (Goodwin JS, et al. Arch Intern Med. 2011 May 9 [Epub ahead of print]).

Most professional guidelines now recommend screening for hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection in essentially all patients receiving chemotherapy, but it is seldom performed and is not cost-effective in patients with solid (nonhematologic) tumors, according to studies presented at ASCO 2011.

Ongoing efforts to screen asymptomatic persons for pancreatic cancer have been unsuccessful, but targeting persons at high risk for the disease appears to be clinically effective as well as cost-effective.

An analysis of payer and provider responses to key clinical information presented at the ASCO 2011 annual meeting offers a glimpse of the oncology landscape shared by oncologists and health plans.

Widespread adoption of information technology (IT) is now regarded as a pathway to improving healthcare and achieving the highly regarded goals for redesigning care.

Dose-monitoring programs for oral chemotherapy drugs can reduce wastage and reduce the risk of serious adverse effects associated with these drugs.

ACOs are believed to hold the potential for addressing variation in quality and costs of cancer care, but their impact will depend on buy-in and leadership among oncologists, according to David Miller, MD, MPH, a urologic surgeon and health services researcher at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He addressed this topic during the recent annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncologists.