Articles

Cancer Centers of Excellence play an important role in the delivery of cancer care. Future expansion into the communities and remotely will benefit patients, employers, and payers, and may help to close health disparity gaps.

Greg Simon, who led the Cancer Moonshot program under the Obama-Biden administration, asserts that the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed vast chasms of inequity in cancer care, and challenges listeners to think in new ways about how we deliver and pay for care.

From new approaches for sequencing therapy to preparing for an incoming tsunami of delayed diagnoses after months of missed cancer screenings, community cancer providers have a lot to manage in the era of COVID-19.

From the CMS’s Oncology Care Model to future prospects for Oncology Care First and other value-based and alternative payment models, payers share their insights on what is most likely to succeed to improve care and manage costs in oncology.

From quality-adjusted life-years to social determinants of health to the international pricing index, top experts in cancer care economics discussed strategies for achieving the Holy Grail of true value-based pricing for pharmaceuticals.

At the July 2020 AACR virtual meeting on COVID-19 and cancer, Solange Peters, MD, PhD, European Society for Medical Oncology President, and Head, Medical Oncology Department, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Lausanne, Switzerland, delivered the keynote address, providing an update on the COVID-19 and Cancer Consortium cohort study.

The urgent international push to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus represents an unprecedented effort, said experts at the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care’s final summer webinar on COVID-19 and cancer care, which was held August 27

Adding the oral cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK)4/CDK6 inhibitor abemaciclib (Verzenio) to endocrine therapy led to a significant reduction in the risk for invasive disease recurrence versus endocrine therapy alone in patients with high-risk hormone receptor (HR)-positive, HER2-negative early-stage breast cancer, according to findings from the phase 3 monarchE clinical trial. The results were presented at the 2020 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) virtual meeting and were featured at the meeting press conference.

Disparities in cancer care remains a public health challenge in the United States, despite some strides in reducing these disparities, according to a new report from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) that was released in a virtual presentation on September 16, 2020. Furthermore, many of the populations affected by cancer care disparities are the ones affected by disparities related to the COVID-19 pandemic, AACR experts said.

“COVID-19 is more than just the common cold. It represents a perpetual challenge for which we have to be perpetually prepared,” stated Anthony S. Fauci, MD, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAD), in his keynote lecture at the July 2020 AACR virtual meeting on COVID-19 and cancer. Dr Fauci has been Director of NIAD for 36 years.