NCCN Patient Advocacy Summit: Delivering Value for Patients Across the Oncology Ecosystem.

As the oncology ecosystem shifts from service-based care to outcomes and value-based care, stakeholders cite concerns regarding the lack of patient experience data that are important to the patient community. To address the patient perspective and highlight the challenges and opportunities within policy and clinical decision-making to improve patient-centered care, NCCN hosted the NCCN Patient Advocacy Summit: Delivering Value for Patients Across the Oncology Ecosystem on December 11, 2019, in Washington, DC. The summit featured multidisciplinary panel discussions, keynote speakers, and patient advocate presentations exploring the implications for patient-centered care within a shifting health policy landscape. This article encapsulates and expounds upon the discussions and presentations from the summit.

The State of Cancer Care in America: Impact of State Policy on Access to High-Quality Cancer Care.

Health policy in America has shifted rapidly over the last decade, and states are increasingly exercising greater authority over health policy decision-making. This localization and regionalization of healthcare policy poses significant challenges for patients with cancer, providers, advocates, and policymakers. To identify the challenges and opportunities that lay ahead of stakeholders, NCCN hosted the 2019 Policy Summit: The State of Cancer Care in America on June 27, 2019, in Washington, DC. The summit featured multidisciplinary panel discussions to explore the implications for access to quality cancer care within a shifting health policy landscape from a patient, provider, and lawmaker perspective. This article encapsulates the discussion from this NCCN Policy Summit.

NCCN Policy Summit: Defining, Measuring, and Applying Quality in an Evolving Health Policy Landscape and the Implications for Cancer Care.

Quality measurement is a critical component of advancing a health system that pays for performance over volume. Although there has been significant attention paid to quality measurement within health systems in recent years, significant challenges to meaningful measurement of quality care outcomes remain. Defining cost can be challenging, but is arguably not as elusive as quality, which lacks standard measurement methods and units. To identify industry standards and recommendations for the future, NCCN recently hosted the NCCN Oncology Policy Summit: Defining, Measuring, and Applying Quality in an Evolving Health Policy Landscape and the Implications for Cancer Care. Key stakeholders including physicians, payers, policymakers, patient advocates, and technology partners reviewed current quality measurement programs to identify success and challenges, including the Oncology Care Model. Speakers and panelists identified gaps in quality measurement and provided insights and suggestions for further advancing quality measurement in oncology. This article provides insights and recommendations; however, the goal of this program was to highlight key issues and not to obtain consensus.

Quality Measurement in Cancer Care: A Review and Endorsement of High-Impact Measures and Concepts.

Although oncology care has evolved, outcome assessment remains a key challenge. Outcome measurement requires identification and adoption of a succinct list of metrics indicative of high-quality cancer care for use within and across healthcare systems. NCCN established an advisory committee, the NCCN Quality and Outcomes Committee, consisting of provider experts from NCCN Member Institutions and other stakeholders, including payers and patient advocacy, community oncology, and health information technology representatives, to review the existing quality landscape and identify contemporary, relevant cancer quality and outcomes measures by reevaluating validated measures for endorsement and proposing new measure concepts to fill crucial gaps. This manuscript reports on 22 measures and concepts; 15 that align with existing measures and 7 that are new.

Advocating for Equity in Cancer Care.

Demographic factors such as race, socioeconomic status, gender identity, area of residence, native language, and cultural barriers have an effect on outcomes in cancer care. To identify unmet needs, challenges, and opportunities in achieving high-quality, patient-centered cancer care for all, NCCN conducted a yearlong environmental scan, which involved stakeholder meetings with patients and patient advocacy groups to discuss these topics. The findings from this scan informed the corresponding NCCN Patient Advocacy Summit: Advocating for Equity in Cancer Care, held in Washington, DC, on December 10, 2018. In addition to the many patient advocacy groups, the summit featured a number of other stakeholders that advocate for equity in cancer care. This article encapsulates the findings of the environmental scan and the discussion from the NCCN Patient Advocacy Summit.