The Journal of Clinical Pathways caught up with Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center’s Michael Neuss on the progress of value in cancer care following the 2018 National Comprehensive Cancer Network conference.
Neuss during the panel said “we are making progress” toward bringing more value in cancer care delivery, and JCP asked him to expand on his comment.
“As you know, value has been defined as outcome divided by cost,” he said. “As many new treatments have meaningfully improved the outcome for some patients — consider checkpoint inhibitors and CAR T-cells — at the right price point, they have unquestionably improved the value of cancer care, too.
“However, as there’s no dataset that integrates billing and clinical data, we can’t evaluate the value created in this subset of patients. If there were, we could talk more openy about fair pricing for these treatments. And even if you increase the cost, if you have enough good outcomes, you’ve increased the value.”
