CER Daily Newsfeed

Reforming Medicare Quality Measurement

(9/30, Joel White, Joseph Puthumana, Peter Cram, Ge Bai, Health Affairs Forefront) comments “...Quality measures should be refocused toward meaningful health outcomes and patient improvement rather than an excessive box-checking exercise in which physicians—working through algorithms built into electronic health records—are forced to spend inordinate amounts of time on documentation...For example, according to a Commonwealth Fund issue brief, clinicians have referred to value-based payment models as ‘just fee-for-service with this extra layer of reporting and accountability that the system is not structured to support,’ and primary care physicians cited burdensome coding and documentation requirements as primary reasons they have avoided adopting those models.” Full

Real-World Evidence Complements and Contextualizes Randomized Clinical Trial Insights in Colorectal Cancer

(9/30, Ashley Chan, OncLive) reports “...‘[Randomized clinical trials] all seem to be relatively interchangeable at face value. Differences are primarily the toxicities, and efficacy is all very similar in the range, especially when we focus on survival, which is the ultimate end point,’ [Tanios S. Bekaii-Saab, MD] said. ‘Frankly, this is where we take our real-world evidence data and apply that standard to help us in practice. Therefore, there's a role for both [clinical trial data and real-world evidence], and it's essentially a role that allows us to use them complementarily, to inform practice.’” Full