The Increasing Burden of Prior Authorizations in the Delivery of Oncology Care in the United States

Dr. Pennell and Dr. Nancy Lin discuss whether prior authorizations reduce overall health expenditures.
Read the related article "Increasing Burden of Prior Authorizations in the Delivery of Oncology Care in the United States" on JOP.

Hello, and welcome back to the ASCO Journal of Oncology Practice podcast. This is Dr. Nate Pennell, medical oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic and consultant editor for the JOP. Today, we're going to talk about a topic that I think is going to resonate with just about every clinical oncologist in America-- prior authorizations. Although these have been around for longer than I've been practicing, it really seemed to me over the last couple of years that more and more claims have been denied by insurance companies, more requirements for prior authorizations, and often for things that really didn't seem like they used to need prior authorizations, such as inexpensive medications. And now, based on data from the 2017 ASCO Oncology Practice Survey, we have some hard data that isn't just my imagination. This is a real phenomenon that is putting stress on an already stressed health system. Joining me today to talk about this topic is Dr. Nancy Lin, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Metastatic Breast Cancer Program at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. She's going to discuss her and her co-author's editorial titled "The Increasing Burden of Prior Authorizations in the Delivery of Oncology Care in the United States." For 2018, the JOP is publishing a series of papers on the state of cancer care in America, and this is part of that series. Welcome, Nancy. Thanks for joining me. Thank you. I know probably most people listening to this are familiar with prior authorizations. But can you talk just a little bit about, what is the intended purpose of prior authorizations? And is this something that ever made sense before the current craziness? Sure. Before I start, I would just like to acknowledge my co-authors on this editorial, Harvey Bichkoff, the CEO of Marin Cancer Care, and Dr. Michael Hassett, a medical oncologist at Dana-Farber. So together, we run the spectrum between academic oncologists, community practices, as well as Dr. Hassett has an interest in health policy-- so kind of running the gamut of interests here. You know, I think we can all agree that the cost of cancer care continues to increase-- I don't think that's a controversy at all-- and that continuation along this trajectory is not sustainable in the long term. So insurers, whether they are public or private, are struggling to keep premiums down while keeping up with all the new advances in diagnostics and treatments, and many of these are quite expensive. So, you think prior authorizations came out of this, which is that an attempt to try to maintain some cost containment in a way that, at least at the outset, the hope was that this would be in a fashion that would lead to the use of treatments in a medically indicated fashion and reduce the use of non-indicated treatments. That sort of makes sense, doesn't it? If people are doing things that don't have a lot of data behind them or are using the most trendy, expensive test or medication, it might actually make sense to have some control to make sure that they're following some reasonable practice or guideline. Yeah, I don't think that what is most upsetting oncologists, or oncology nurses, or front-line staff is denial of unproven or unuseful treatments. I think it's really the many and what seems to be increasing hoops that one needs to jump through in order to get testing or treatments that are really the right thing to do for patients that are really well within the standard of care. So while the PA system might have started with good intentions, I think as it is often currently constituted-- I don't want to lump all the systems together in one. But I think it contributes in a way to sort of a siege mentality. So I think if you talk to any practicing oncologist, you will hear stories of the kinds of struggles they have had getting very standard treatments approved in a timely fashion. And while in the short term, most of us make these heroic efforts to get things approved, I think that process really as set up is really counterproductive in terms of the long-term health of our health care system. So at the institution I work with at Dana-Farber, we tried to actually do a project where we quantified some of these kind of gestalt feelings. And so what we did is we actually looked at all prior authorizations for outpatient medications originating from the breast medical oncology practice over a six-month period of time. And we focused only on outpatient medication. So we're not talking about scan authorizations or IV chemotherapy but just outpatient oral medications, whether antineoplastic or not. And we found that we had to process over 300 PAs over a six-month period of time and that 97% of the PAs that were requested were approved on the very first try. We went back, and we coded whether the medications were being prescribed in accordance to NCCN guidelines. And yes, most of the time they were. And strikingly, we actually found that 15% of our PA requests were for generic medicines, like tamoxifen, aromatase inhibitors. These are medicines where there's just absolutely no debate about the efficacy or importance of the treatments. They've been around forever-- maybe not forever, but for many, many years. They're available in generic form. They're inexpensive. And then seemingly random treatments, no matter how much we appealed, we couldn't get through the PA process. And this includes a scopolamine patch for refractory chemotherapy-induced nausea or Lupron for the purpose of ovarian suppression. And I think that when clinicians deal with this on a daily basis, they see that almost 98% of their prior auths go through the first time, that you get these sort of bizarre requests for all sorts of paperwork for tamoxifen, for goodness sakes. It really gives a sense of being besieged by paperwork and process and not really being able to see a clear benefit of the PA system. And I think that really is what contributes to this burnout and the sense that the prior authorization process is broken. And it's not just your colleagues in Boston. I know, certainly, I've had that sensation here. But now we have some national data suggesting this is a problem being felt everywhere. I know that the most recent ASCO practice census, and maybe you could give us a little background on what that is, seems to show that this is a burden everywhere. ASCO actually conducted an oncology practice survey. So they've surveyed about 395 practices in 2017. This actually represented about almost 60% of the US hematology-oncology workforce. So was is a pretty big survey. There were 7,200-or-so respondents. And what was found, the key point was that payer pressures were actually the most important pressure that was felt by practices. And this was felt across all types of practices-- academic, physician-owned, rural, urban-- and that prior authorizations were actually the most commonly cited pain point, and they were cited by 78% of the respondents. So this is really something that people are feeling, truly, on a daily basis. And this is not limited just to oncology. There was a related survey by the American Medical Association. This covered not only medical oncology but primary care and other specialties and, basically, found very similar findings. Prior authorizations are a huge burden on practices. In fact, in the AMA survey, 90% of practices reported delays in care because of PAs. Almost 80% abandoned treatment plans at least some of the time because the PA is too burdensome. So these are things that have direct effects on patients. Oh, absolutely. And I think what was striking to me about the practice censuses, you may think this has always been a major issue, but this is a real change …