NCCN Virtual Patient Advocacy Summit: Cancer Across the Lifespan.

Patients with cancer have widely divergent experiences throughout their care from screening through survivorship. Differences in care delivery and outcomes may be due to varying patient preferences, patient needs according to stage of life, access to care, and implicit or explicit bias in care according to patient age. NCCN convened a series of stakeholder meetings with patients, caregivers, and patient advocacy groups to discuss the complex challenges and robust opportunities in this space.

Accelerating Advances in Cancer Care Research: A Lookback at the 21st Century Cures Act in 2020.

The 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act), signed into law in 2016, was designed to advance new therapies by modernizing clinical trials, funding research initiatives, and accelerating the development and use of health information technology. To analyze the current issues in cancer care related to the implementation and impact of the Cures Act, NCCN convened a multistakeholder working group. Participants discussed the legislation's impact on the oncology community since enactment and identified the remaining gaps and challenges as experienced by stakeholders.

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.