One of the challenges for medical oncologists and other oncologists who treat cancer patients is that increasingly they need to understand more about value.
There’s a history of providing clinical effectiveness information, and physicians use this to select the appropriate treatments. But the value equation means that oncologists need to have conversations with their patients about affordability, not only what will work, but what’s affordable in the minds of their patients.
This makes the job of an oncologist increasingly challenging, but also, if done well, can help make treatments much more patient-centered than the way we were doing things previously.
