Send us a text

Our Editor-in-Chief Dr. Sue Yom hosts a discussion of reimbursement and the application of alternative payment models to radiation oncology. Guests are Dr. Brian Baumann, Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology and Chief of the Genitourinary Service at Washington University in St. Louis, and Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. James Yu, Professor and Executive Vice Chair of Radiation Oncology at Columbia University, who specializes in genitourinary and brain malignancies and is an expert in population-based data and comparative effectiveness research. We discuss three articles, "Association of the Oncology Care Model with Value-Based Changes in Use of Radiation Therapy", "Decreases in Radiation Oncology Medicare Reimbursement over Time: Analysis by Billing Code", led by Dr. Baumann, and "The RO-APM: The Wrong Solution to the Wrong Problem", written by Dr. Yu. We review the recent history of payment models for radiation oncology and what this new research tells us about the ability of these models to affect the value or quality of radiation oncology care.