Clinical Trials Financially Beneficial for Patients: Eric Lander, MD

Eric Lander, MD, site research leader at Minnesota Oncology, spoke with The American Journal of Managed Care® after participating in the Institute for Value-Based Medicine® meeting held in Minneapolis on June 17. The panel Lander participated on focused on several topics revolving around National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines and how their recommendations are practiced in real-world settings.

In this video, Lander discusses the benefits of clinical trials when it comes to out-of-pocket costs for patients, highlighting how affordable these trials make oncology treatment.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

How are clinical trials financially beneficial to both practices and patients?

Clinical trials in general are favorable for patients and providers in the sense that they can actually reduce the overall cost of care for patients, in terms of the patient out-of-pocket costs. As an example, I just enrolled a patient on an NCI [National Cancer Institute] study where the patient would have had to, on standard of care, have their insurance pay for very expensive treatment. Their insurance, generally speaking, was not the best insurance. I'm trying to be vague. But on the study, the treatment was actually covered by the trial, [which was] a huge financial lift for that patient, whose family actually relies on him for for his income. There's a lot of examples where study drug costs can be removed from patients. Additionally, on studies, in order to monitor very close for safety signals and efficacy outcomes, there are additional tests that are performed that are paid for by the study. You could argue that patients are actually getting closer monitoring and closer care that is of no financial burden to them compared to if they were not on study. At the practice level, could you argue that, financially, practices, benefit from research? I think that's really hard to answer. In general, I would say, if they do, it's not by much at all, but in many cases they do not benefit. I think that's all right. We should be doing research for the right reasons to find better treatments for our patients, so that's okay.