Impact of Cancer Care Regionalization on Patient Volume.

Background: Cancer centers are regionalizing care to expand patient access, but the effects on patient volume are unknown. This study aimed to compare patient volumes before and after the establishment of head and neck regional care centers (HNRCCs).

Methods: This study analyzed 35,394 unique new patient visits at MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC) before and after the creation of HNRCCs.

Impact of an Interdisciplinary Goals-of-Care Program Among Medical Inpatients at a Comprehensive Cancer Center During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Propensity Score Analysis.

Purpose: Many hospitals have established goals-of-care programs in response to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic; however, few have reported their outcomes. We examined the impact of a multicomponent interdisciplinary goals-of-care program on intensive care unit (ICU) mortality and hospital outcomes for medical inpatients with cancer.

Methods: This single-center study with a quasi-experimental design included consecutive adult patients with cancer admitted to medical units at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, TX, during the 8-month preimplementation (May 1, 2019-December 31, 2019) and postimplementation period (May 1, 2020-December 31, 2020).

A flexible-hazards cure model with application to patients with soft tissue sarcoma.

In medical research, it is often of great interest to have an accurate estimation of cure rates by different treatment options and for different patient groups. If the follow-up time is sufficiently long and the sample size is large, the proportion of cured patients will make the Kaplan-Meier estimator of survival function have a flat plateau at its tail, whose value indicates the overall cure rate. However, it may be difficult to estimate and compare the cure rates for all the subsets of interest in this way, due to the limit of sample sizes and curse of dimensionality.