AMCP Partnership Forum: Driving Value and Outcomes in Oncology

Cancer is one of the most costly medical conditions to treat in the United States due in part to increasingly innovative, but expensive, chemotherapeutic, immuno-oncologic, and biologic treatments. At the same time, health insurance in the United States is increasingly shifting a larger part of the costs to patients through higher premiums, deductibles, and coinsurance and copayment rates. These shifts are driving the need for quality measures and value measurements in oncology that assess the total effect on care and can be used to develop payment models. Measures that consider the patient’s experience are emerging as important factors for evaluating value in cancer care. To address these issues, the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) convened a stakeholder forum, Driving Value and Outcomes in Oncology, on November 14-15, 2017, in Arlington, Virginia. The goals of the forum were to (a) understand which oncology-specific quality measures are important for managed care decision makers; (b) prioritize the gaps related to the use of pharmaceuticals in measuring oncology outcomes; (c) develop a list of recommendations for how a collaboration of payers, providers, and AMCP may drive improvements in oncology care; and (d) define solutions for addressing causes of patient financial burdens for cancer care. More than 30 national and regional health care leaders representing health plans, integrated delivery systems, pharmacy benefit managers, pharmacists, employers, patient advocates, national professional associations, and biopharmaceutical companies participated in the forum.