Articles

San Diego—Payers believe that prescribing information, national guidelines, and prospective controlled randomized trials (PCRTs) are the most useful sources of information about oncology drugs, according to researchers from Genentech, Inc (South San Francisco).

San Diego—For health plans attempting to cut costs, instituting higher out-of-pocket (OOP) payments for patients taking oral oncology drugs may not be a prudent solution, according to research presented at the AMCP’s annual meeting.

Presenting the findings at the annual meeting of the AMCP, lead researcher Shetal Desai, PharmD, discussed how NCH decreased the number of disputed claims and recovered more than $1 million in drug replacement from manufacturer patient-assistance programs across 18 months after bringing a managed care pharmacist on board.

San Diego—Despite increasing interest in cost-effectiveness (CE) research, the groups conducting these analyses continue to use models that are very different from each other, hampering a more precise understanding of drug comparability.

Even before enactment of national healthcare reform initiatives, development and implementation of a variety of comparative effectiveness research (CER) was well under way, even if it was not specifically called comparative effectiveness.

Recent articles in the New England Journal of Medicine¹ and the Journal of the American Medical Association² note the tremendous increase in the cost of cancer care, which has at least doubled since 1990. The reasons for this steep increase have been attributed to the release and utilization of new medications, in tandem with more sophisticated surgery and radiation techniques.

Washington, DC—Health information technology (IT) and informatics are fundamental to all comparative effectiveness research (CER), Amy Abernethy, MD, associate director of the Duke Comprehensive Medical Center and founder and director of the Duke Cancer Care Research Program, told attendees at a session of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) 101st Annual Meeting.

With the inclusion of $1.1 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvest ment Act of 2009 for comparative effectiveness research (CER), this topic has suddenly become a matter of great importance in the clinical and research communities.

There’s no question that when, on March 29, a federal district court judge ruled the patents held by Myriad Genetics to the BRCA1 and 2 gene mutation sequences are invalid, a shock went through the healthcare and genetics communities.

As health plans grapple with the rapidly rising cost of oncology medications and a “buy and bill” system that does not work for physicians or for the plans, they are seeking new strategies for providing these life-saving drugs to their members and for freeing up oncology and hematology practices to focus solely on caring for patients, not managing a pharmacy.