Hey, everybody out there in Medscape land, John Marshall here to do shameless promotion of our annual symposium here at the Ruesch Center for the Cure of Gastrointestinal Cancers. It's being held December 3, 4, and 5.
Remember, our symposia mix patients, caregivers, advocacy groups, insurance payers, regulatory people, FDA people, NIH people, and folks from Capitol Hill. We all get together, and we talk about challenging issues in gastrointestinal (GI) cancer.
On Thursday morning, December 3, we have people from Capitol Hill coming to talk about policies around funding for cancer, cancer research, and this concept of value and outcomes. How are we going to measure that? What are the Hill policies on that? Then, Thursday evening, we will all get together and do an update in GI cancers. We're going to talk about immunotherapy in GI cancer and molecular profiling in GI cancer, and we will review some challenging cases to discuss how to increase our chances of curing patients with GI cancer.
Friday starts off with a session on young people with colon cancer—this huge group of patients that's out there nowadays under the age of 50 years, under the age of 40 years, some under the age of 30 years with colon cancer. How are they different? What are their special needs and issues?
For the main event, we have brought people from all over the country to talk about value and outcomes. We know that we're going to be judged on those. How are we going to measure this? Who's going to set the rules about what's worth it and what's not? So, we have folks from pharma, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), and payers. Dr Lowell Schnipper, who wrote the American Society of Clinical Oncology position piece on what drugs should cost,[1] will give the keynote address. We have health economists coming. We have patients and patient advocates to reflect on what they hear. And then, we will have a little cocktail party that night, which is awfully fun.
On Saturday, we will get back together, entering through the inflatable colon, for a huge patient symposium on the issues that confront our patients, day in and day out.
We are pumped. We would love you to join us; watch this space on Medscape to see some of the content as that meeting goes forward. Come to Washington, if you're not here already. Join us for the 2015 Ruesch Symposium: Fighting a Smarter War on Cancer. This year, we are focused on measuring value and outcomes.
This is John Marshall for Medscape.
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Any views expressed above are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of WebMD or Medscape.
Cite this: John L. Marshall. Stakeholders to Scope Out Value in GI Cancer Therapy - Medscape - Nov 30, 2015.
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