Although financial toxicity has become an important issue in the oncology community, evidence suggests the subject is rarely addressed by oncologists, exacerbating its grave effects on patients with cancer and their families. “But I don’t think it’s because health-care providers don’t want to talk about it. I think it’s because they feel they can’t do anything about the situation,” said Hanna K. Sanoff, MD, MPH, as she began her presentation titled, “Challenges and Triumphs of Addressing Financial Toxicity in Clinical Care” at the 2018 ASCO Quality Care Symposium.

As an internist, I strived to give patients hope by prescribing therapies that increased their chance—their hope—of the best outcome and by encouraging them with hopeful words. My own hope was to care for patients until I was old.

In December, The University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School will launch an innovative cancer care model called the CaLM (cancer life re-imagined) Clinic as part of its new cancer center, the Livestrong Cancer Institutes. The goal of the Livestrong Cancer Institutes and the CaLM Clinic is to provide a holistic approach to caring for patients with cancer from their initial cancer diagnosis and treatment throughout survivorship, including palliative and supportive care.

In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Kathryn C. Arbour, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and colleagues found that baseline treatment with corticosteroids was associated with poorer efficacy of programmed cell death protein 1/programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-1/PD-L1) inhibitors in patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).¹ As stated by the investigators, “On-treatment corticosteroids for treatment of immune-related adverse events do not seem to affect efficacy [of these agents], but the potential impact of baseline corticosteroids at the time of treatment initiation is unknown.”