Meg Barbor, MPH

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.

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.

Utilization management strategies allow payers to manage the cost of healthcare benefits, but according to Ray D. Page, DO, PhD, FACOI, President, the Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders, Weatherford, TX, this practice often leads to burdensome requirements on oncologists and an increased administrative workload.

By now all oncologists know that the implementation of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) is shifting physician reimbursement from a volume- to a value-based model. To succeed with MACRA, practices must become familiar with how this will affect them and get ready to incorporate the new measures to ensure they get the best level of reimbursement under this program.