Articles and Blogs

Advocacy in Action: Putting Guardrails Around Step Therapy

June 10, 2021

Step therapy, also known as “fail first” therapy, requires patients to try (and “fail”) one or more lower-cost medications before the insurance plan will cover the drug originally prescribed by a patient’s physician. This "fail first" requirement is problematic, causing unnecessary delays in care and increased anxiety in patients waiting for the insurance coverage decision.

Last week, on a new ACCCBuzz blog, TACOS President-Elect Raju Vaddepally, MD, Yuma Regional Medical Center Cancer Center, interviewed with the Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC), sharing his perspective on how step therapy has impacted the staff and patients at his practice, and the importance of Senate Bill 1270 in protecting patient access to care.
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2020 ACCC Innovator Awards: Making Outpatient Chemo Possible

August 6, 2020

To improve patient care and reduce overall costs, the University of Arizona Cancer Center at Banner University Medical Center in Tucson—ACCC Innovator Award winner— transitioned to delivering select chemotherapies in its ambulatory clinics. Doing so took a significant coordinated effort. The task of assessing which chemotherapies could be safely administered in the outpatient setting took a multidisciplinary team a full year. The team then developed workflows for each chemotherapy to be administered in outpatient clinics and educated staff about the relevant chemotherapies’ potential side effects and toxicities. A year and a half after launching the effort, the University of Arizona Cancer Center transitioned to administering select chemotherapy its ambulatory clinics, reducing overnight hospital stays and lowering costs to patients and the health system.
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