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In the evolving landscape of today’s healthcare industry, more and more demands are being placed on practice managers and their staff.

In reality, scheduling appointments with significant lead times, often weeks or months before the actual appointment, may actually cause more problems and serve fewer patients.

Given the high cost of oncology drugs, it is important for pharmacists to become more business savvy regarding their practices.

“There are a number of ways to go wrong when you’re trying to improve something,” said Kaveh G. Shojania, MD, Director, Centre for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety, University of Toronto, Canada, and Editor-in-Chief, BMJ Quality & Safety, who delivered the keynote address at the 2018 ASCO Quality Care Symposium.

In a time when the country feels more politically divided than ever, there is broad consensus that Medicare should be allowed to negotiate prescription drug prices directly with drug makers, and that the FDA should expedite approvals of generic cancer drugs to lower patients’ out-of-pocket costs.

There’s really only one way to identify how patients are coping with serious illness: by asking them, according to Thomas J. Smith, MD, FACP, Director of Palliative Medicine, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, MD.

Business intelligence is the process of collecting data from disparate systems—internal and external—and turning it into information that is meaningful and actionable toward achieving strategic goals.

The McKesson value-based care team employs a combination of tactics to help practices in The US Oncology Network achieve success in the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). One of the challenges with the new MIPS program is the need to focus on the current year’s performance, while taking steps to ensure that practices are successful in future years.

Oncology practices are challenged by day-to-day operational functions, which are often related to payment, reimbursement, and competition, according to the new survey titled “The State of Oncology Practice in America” from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) on the oncology practice landscape in the United States.