Policies & Guidelines

On July 14, 2010, the Departments of Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services issued interim final rules for group health plans and health insurance issuers to provide detail on how those entities are to cover the preventive services required under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).

Silver Spring, MD—Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) are required from some drug manufacturers as part of a new US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation designed to draw the attention of sponsors, providers, and patients to the likelihood of severe adverse events accompanying certain drugs and biologic agents.

New Orleans, LA—The number of cancer survivors is increasing. To keep up with this trend, survivorship care must evolve and become more efficient, insists Jennifer R. Klemp, PhD, MPH, MA, Director, Cancer Survivorship, University of Kansas Cancer Center, Westwood. A growing number of patients are living with or through their disease, while the provider workforce is shrinking.

Orlando, FL—Somatostatin analogs have multiple roles in the treatment of neuroendocrine tumors (NETs), including the management of symptoms of hormone hypersecretion and, more recently, slowing tumor progression.

Washington, DC—In the past 6 years, more than $4 billion in charitable assistance has been dedicated to patients in need. In 2015 alone, the Patient Access Network (PAN) Foundation provided $950 million in cancer care support. The only people with deep enough pockets to support this type of assistance are drug manufacturers, adding to an already complicated regulatory environment for charitable assistance programs, said Daniel J. Klein, President and Chief Executive Officer, PAN Foundation, at the Sixth Annual Conference of the Association for Value-Based ­Cancer Care.

Washington, DC—A panel discussion on health and drug politics took place at the Sixth Annual Conference of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care. The expert panel included Kavita Patel, MD, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Baltimore; Dan Todd, Principal of Todd Strategy, Washington, DC; and Liz Fowler, Vice President, Global Health Policy, Johnson & Johnson. The panel discussed what is working in healthcare, what is not, and where cancer care fits into it all.

As cancer care providers well know, the landscape of healthcare delivery is changing in complex and dramatic ways. Two related trends are driving this change: the shift among payers to value-based reimbursement, and rapidly evolving patient expectations.

Total drug spending in the United States, based on invoice prices, reached $425 billion in 2015, according to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics report, “Medicines Use and Spending in the U.S.: A Review of 2015 and Outlook to 2020.” When adjusted for net price spending, $310 billion went to drug and biotech companies, but where the other $115 billion went is often omitted from media coverage.