Clinical Pathways: Recommendations for Putting Patients at the Center of Value-Based Care.

Two major trends that have been affecting the provision of oncology care in the United States are a shift from volume-based to value-based care and a push toward patient-centered healthcare. However, these two trends are not always completely aligned with each other. Value-based payment models, including clinical pathways, are one strategy being implemented by oncology stakeholders to help encourage the uptake of value-based oncology care.

Accelerating the delivery of patient-centered, high-quality cancer care.

Significant progress has been made in the past 50 years across the field of oncology, and, as a result, the number of cancer survivors in the United States is more than 14.5 million. In fact, the number of cancer survivors continues to grow on an annual basis, which is due in part to improved treatments that help people with cancer live longer, and improvements in early detection that allow doctors to find cancer earlier when the disease is easier to treat.

Turning the tide against cancer through sustained medical innovation: the pathway to progress.

An ever-expanding understanding of the molecular basis of the more than 200 unique diseases collectively called cancer, combined with efforts to apply these insights to clinical care, is forming the foundation of an era of personalized medicine that promises to improve cancer treatment. At the same time, these extraordinary opportunities are occurring in an environment of intense pressure to contain rising healthcare costs. This environment presents a challenge to oncology research and clinical care, because both are becoming progressively more complex and expensive, and because the current tools to measure the cost and value of advances in care (e.

The case for personalized medicine.

Personalized medicine may be considered an extension of traditional approaches to understanding and treating disease, but with greater precision. Physicians may now use a patient's genetic variation or expression profile as well as protein and metabolic markers to guide the selection of certain drugs or treatments. In many cases, the information provided by molecular markers predicts susceptibility to conditions.