Cancer Survivorship Across the Healthcare Continuum

Excerpt

As America struggles to enact meaningful health care reforms, there is great interest in and support for ensuring comprehensive, coordinated and patient-centered health care. But the challenges to delivering this type of health care are both great and systemic, ranging from regulation to reimbursement, and within the debate we risk the focus being taken off of the patient. Nowhere is this risk greater than for those diagnosed with cancer who rely upon a coordinated system to help them navigate multiple specialists and ensure the best, most timely care possible to save their lives. Fortunately, general internists are trained to treat patients as whole people, not as organ systems affected by disease, thus enabling them to approach this issue from a distinct perspective. As our understanding of quality cancer care increases and our focus expands to include cancer survivorship, we must ensure the patients’ goals for their life after cancer are central to their care, not something to be dealt with as an afterthought once treatment is finished and the patient returns to the care of the general internist. …