Evaluating the Impact of Treatment Care Planning on Quality Measures.

Purpose: The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation Oncology Care Model (OCM) requires documentation of a 13-point Institute of Medicine care management plan for Medicare patients. In addition, OCM includes evaluation of quality using key performance measures that align with the ASCO Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI). Both efforts are designed to improve patient-centered care and foster patients' engagement in their care plan.

Sickle Cell Disease in Pregnancy.

Sickle cell disease (SCD) is the most common hereditary disorder and affects 30 million people worldwide. Advances in science have improved overall survival in patients with SCD and as such, more patients are reaching reproductive age and are becoming pregnant. SCD in pregnancy leads to multiple complications that put both the mother and fetus at risk, and patients with SCD have six times the mortality during pregnancy as compared with patients without SCD.

Emerging agents for the therapy of advanced prostate cancer.

Since 2010, multiple advances have been made in the field of metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer including regulatory approvals for five new agents including androgen pathway inhibitors (enzalutamide, abiraterone acetate), immunotherapy (sipuleucel-T), cytotoxic chemotherapy (cabazitaxel) and radiopharmaceuticals (radium-223) that have improved overall survival in this patient population. Despite these advances, each therapy has only extended median survival by 3-5 months and data suggest substantial cross-resistance among them. Given these modest increments, there is a major role for the vigorous investigation of new drugs and predictive biomarkers to select suitable patients who will benefit from them.

Incidental discovery of a testicular plasmacytoma at initial presentation of multiple myeloma.

Testicular plasmacytomas are a rare phenomenon reported in the literature and they can occur as a solitary plasmacytoma, as a recurrence of multiple myeloma, or concurrently in an active myeloma. We report the case of a 43-year-old man who presented with back pain and was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. A CT scan performed to determine the extent of disease revealed an incidental mass in the testicle.