Quality of Cancer Care
Quality of Cancer Care has been designated as one of the eight "challenge"
areas in NCI's 2003 "Bypass Budget" (see The
Nation's Investment in Cancer Research: Plans and Priorities). The purpose
of this effort, substantially supported by the Applied Research Program, is to
enhance the state of the science on the quality of cancer care and inform
federal and private-sector decision making on care delivery, coverage,
regulation, and standard setting. Work is underway to make cancer a working
model for quality of care research and the translation of this research into
practice. This requires addressing how data collection about cancer care can be
standardized and made most useful to a variety of audiences-including providers,
patients and their families, purchasers, payers, researchers, and
policymakers.
To carry out this initiative, the Applied Research Program has spearheaded several key
activities that include:
- an interagency working committee (The Quality of Cancer Care Committee) that
has launched collaborative projects directly involving NCI and the Health
Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services (CMS), and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA);
- a major public-private partnership, the National Quality Forum, to identify
core measures of cancer care quality;
- research on outcomes measurement by the Cancer Outcomes Measurement Working
Group (COMWG) and the Cancer Care
Outcomes Research and Surveillance Consortium (CanCORS), which is supporting
the development and use of clinical and patient-centered outcomes measures for
lung and colorectal cancer;
- research on improving the quality of cancer communications (NCI Extraordinary Opportunities in
Cancer Communications and the Health Communications and
Informatics Research Branch provide additional information on this
research). To this end, staff within the Applied Research Program co-organized
with the Health Communications and Informatics Research Branch a two-day
Consumer-Provider Communication Symposium in January, 2001; and
- research to monitor patterns of treatment dissemination and quality of care
through Patterns of Care/Quality of Care Studies, the Prostate Cancer Outcomes
Study, and studies utilizing the SEER-Medicare
Database.
To learn more about what the program is supporting in these areas of research, see:
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