Recently the NEJM ran a Sounding Board piece on Bending the Cost Curve in Cancer Care. The authors take on this problem:
Annual direct costs for cancer care are projected to rise — from $104 billion in 20061 to over $173 billion in 2020 and beyond.2…Medical oncologists directly or indirectly control or influence the majority of cancer care costs, including the use and choice of drugs, the types of supportive care, the frequency of imaging, and the number and extent of hospitalizations…
The article responds, in part, to Dr. Howard Brody’s 2010 proposal that each medical specialty society find five ways to reduce waste in health care. The authors, from the Divisions of Hematology-Oncology and Palliative Care at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond VA, offer two lists:
Suggested Changes in Oncologists’ Behavior (from the paper, verbatim — Table 1):
1. Target surveillance testing or imaging to situations in which a benefit has been shown.
2. Limit second-line and third-line treatment for metastatic cancer to sequential monotherapies for most solid tumors.
3. Limit chemotherapy to patients with good performance status, with an exception for highly responsive disease.
4. Replace the routine use of white-cell-stimulating factors with a reduction in the chemotherapy dose in metastatic solid cancer.
5. For patients who are not responding to three consecutive regimens, limit further chemotherapy to clinical trials.
Suggested Changes in Attitudes and Practice (same, Table 2):
1. Oncologists need to recognize that the costs of cancer care are driven by what we do and what we do not do.
2. Both doctors and patients need to have more realistic expectations.
3. Realign compensation to value cognitive services, rather than chemotherapy, more highly.
4. Better integrate palliative care into usual oncology care (concurrent care).
5. The need for cost-effectiveness analysis and for some limits on care must be accepted.
—-
For today, I’ll leave this provocative list without comment except to say that it should engender some long and meaningful, even helpful discussion.
—
You may also like Suzana Makowski’s (@suzanakm) take over at Pallimed:
http://www.pallimed.org/2011/06/responding-to-cancer-care-costs.html
She goes into some more details on the points highlighted in the tables above.
–Cheers,
Christian
Thanks, Christian, for pointing me and other readers to the related Pallimed post. I agree with the point made there, as in the NEJM piece, that early integration of palliative care specialists into oncology care is a smart, cost-effective and humane strategy.