Oncologic Services Through Project Access and Other Safety Net Care Coordination Programs

Dr. Pennell and Dr. James Hammock discuss the provision of oncologic services by Project Access safety net care coordination programs.

 

NATHAN PENNELL: Hello, and welcome to the latest JCO Oncology Practice podcast, brought to you by the ASCO Podcast Network, a collection of nine programs covering a range of educational and scientific content, and offering enriching insight into the world of cancer care. You can find all recordings, including this one, at podcast.asco.org.

My name is Dr. Nate Pennell, medical oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic and consulting editor for the JCO OP. I have no conflicts of interest related to this podcast. And a complete list of disclosures is available at the end of the podcast.

Today, I'd like to talk a little bit about the complexities of providing cancer care for patients who are uninsured or underinsured, which is a relatively large percentage of patients in the US.

How do patients without insurance receive cancer care? One way is through community programs, including a program called Project Access, a care coordination program connecting patients to specialty medical care at no or reduced cost, including, in some instances, oncology care.

But how does it work? Who does it help? And how impactful are this and other programs designed to obtain cancer care for low-income, uninsured, and underserved patients? With me today to discuss this topic is Dr. Jamey Hammock, a resident in internal medicine at the University of Alabama Birmingham.

We'll be discussing the paper from he and his colleagues titled, Oncologic Services Through Project Access and Other Safety Net Care Coordination Programs, which was published online July 31, 2020 in the JCO OP. Welcome, Jamey, and thank you for joining me on the podcast.

JAMEY HAMMOCK: Hey. Thank you, very excited to be here. I did want to say too that I do not have any conflicts of interest or disclosures for this particular study.

NATHAN PENNELL: Why don't we start out by talking a little bit about how big a problem it is for providing cancer care in uninsured and underinsured patients in the US.

JAMEY HAMMOCK: It's an enormous problem. If you look at previous studies, they've looked at patients who are underserved, underinsured, or even uninsured with cancer. And these patients actually typically present with later stage disease, they experience delays in treatment, and ultimately have worse overall survival compared to well-insured patients.

So just that alone tells you how big of a problem that this is. I think that when you look at cancer care for underinsured and uninsured, you have to break those things up. And you can't really talk about it without talking about the Affordable Care Act.

So let's take uninsured patients, for example. If you look at pre-Affordable Care Act and post-Affordable Care Act, there's a great study in 2017 that really broke down these two groups, pre and post. And what they found is with the Affordable Care Act, if you are uninsured across any income level and you lived in a Medicaid expansion state, the percentage of patients who were uninsured decreased from about 5% to 2 and 1/2%. So it really cut that percentage in half, which is pretty impressive.

And then if you look at low-income uninsured patients, because they broke that down in the study, the percentage actually dropped from around 10% to 3 and 1/2%. So It just shows you when you talk about absolute numbers and then those percentages, how many individuals are really affected that have a diagnosis of cancer and are uninsured. And it gives you a little bit of insight of what Medicaid expansion has done for that group.

And then I want to touch really quickly too on underinsured. So basically underinsured patients, they don't have the means to get the care that they need, even if they have insurance. That's important.

And patients with Medicaid, for example, they have i