Impact on Oncology Practices of Including Drug Costs in Bundled Payments.

INTRODUCTION: This analysis evaluates the impact of bundling drug costs into a hypothetic bundled payment. METHODS: An economic model was created for patient vignettes from: advanced-stage III colon cancer and metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer. First quarter 2016 Medicare reimbursement rates were used to calculate the average fee-for-service (FFS) reimbursement for these vignettes. The probabilistic risk faced by practices was captured by the type of patients seen in practices and randomly assigned in a Monte Carlo simulation on the basis of the given distribution of patient types within each cancer. Simulations were replicated 1,000 times. The impact of bundled payments that include drug costs for various practice sizes and cancer types was quantified as the probability of incurring a loss at four magnitudes: any loss, > 10%, > 20%, or > 30%. A loss was defined as receiving revenue from the bundle that was less than what the practice would have received under FFS; the probability of loss was calculated on the basis of the number of times a practice reported a loss among the 1,000 simulations. RESULTS: Practices that treat a substantial proportion of patients with complex disease compared with the average patient in the bundle would have revenue well below that expected from FFS. Practices that treat a disproportionate share of patients with less complex disease, as compared with the average patient in the bundle, would have revenue well above the revenue under FFS. Overall, bundled payments put practices at greater risk than FFS because their patient case mix could greatly skew financial performance. CONCLUSION: Including drug costs in a bundle is subject to the uncontrollable probabilistic risk of patient case mixes.

Practical issues in palliative and quality-of-life care.

Although palliative care is not new to health care or to oncology, oncologists still struggle to maximize the value of this type of care across the entire care continuum and across the patient's trajectory of illness. When we don't use what may be the best tools for the job, at the right times in the care path, we miss opportunities to optimize patient and family coping, to limit suffering, and to ensure that our care plans are patient centered. In this article, we look at how we define palliative care and how the tools of palliative medicine can be used to enhance patient care in the outpatient oncology practice setting.

Defining Value in Cancer Care: AVBCC 2013 Steering Committee Report.

The AVBCC Annual Meeting experiences exponential growth in attendance and participation as oncologists, payers, employers, managed care executives, patient advocates, and drug manufacturers convened in Hollywood, FL, on May 2-5, 2013, for the Third Annual Conference of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care (AVBCC). The conference presented an all-inclusive open forum for stakeholder dialogue and integration across the cancer care continuum, facilitating an open dialogue among the various healthcare stakeholders to align their perspectives around the urgent need to address value in cancer care, costs, patient education, safety, outcomes, and quality. The AVBCC 2013 Steering Committee was held on the first day of the conference to define value in cancer care. The committee was divided into 7 groups, each representing a key stakeholder in oncology. The goal of the Steering Committee was to define value from the particular point of view of each of the stakeholder groups and to suggest how that particular perspective can contribute to the value proposition in oncology, by balancing cost, quality, and access to care to improve overall patient outcomes. The following summary highlights the major points addressed by each group.