Materials from webinar on improved HUSKY cancer survival in CT without MCOs

Yesterday, Dr. John Cramer described his study published earlier this year describing a significant increase in cancer survival and early detection in Connecticut’s Medicaid program when the Managed Care Organizations left in 2012. Click here for slides and here for a recording of the webinar.

The study — Association of Medicaid Privatization With Patient Cancer Outcomes – was published this January in JCO Oncology Practice. Dr. Cramer is Residency Program Director and Associate Professor in the Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan. He has over sixty-eight publications including first author publications in leading journals including Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, JAMA, and the New England Journal of Medicine.

In the webinar, Dr. Cramer described the motivation for the study. He and his team face great difficulty getting care for Medicaid patients in Michigan. MCOs run Medicaid in Michigan, as in most states. He described one case of a Medicaid patient with a mass in his neck. Because of prior authorization delays and unnecessary tests required by the MCO, the patients’ care was delayed eleven weeks. During that time, the cancer grew and moved to another lymph node.

He also described the study methodology and results comparing cancer survival and early detection rates in Connecticut and New Jersey (comparable states) before and after 2012, when MCOs left our program but not New Jersey’s. Before 2012, our rates were the same. But in 2012 our states began to rise while New Jersey’s didn’t change. By 2016, Medicaid patients with cancer were 4% to be detected early and 8% more likely to survive in Connecticut than in New Jersey. He also offered important recommendations for policymakers toensure care for patients and avoid delays in care.

Dr. Cramer got new ideas for further research into Medicaid MCOs from webinar attendees’ questions.

For Dr. Cramer’s slides, click here.

For a recording of the webinar, click here.