Gerontology remains a practice gap
Oncologists who don’t perform geriatric assessments are probably missing more than they think, Dr. Extermann said in an interview.
“Many oncologists don’t fully realize the importance of [geriatric assessment] yet,” Dr. Extermann said. “They kind of think that their internal medicine training will carry through, and they’ll be able to identify everything; actually, we know very well we miss half of what is found by geriatric assessment clinically.”
Gerontology remains a practice gap, Dr. Extermann said, not only within oncology, but across specialties.
“One of the big problems with the U.S. health care system is we don’t have enough geriatricians, and the reason we don’t have enough geriatricians is because we don’t pay them,” she said.
“Geriatrics is the only specialty where you do more training to be paid less, because Medicare doesn’t reimburse geriatric assessment, [and] it doesn’t reimburse geriatric consultation. [This] doesn’t motivate universities to create geriatric clinics and geriatric programs because they will lose money, basically, doing that. If we want to really solve the problem, we have to solve the reimbursement problem up front,” she explained.
Dr. Williams disclosed financial relationships with Carevive Health Systems, Cardinal Health, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Cancer Society. Dr. Extermann reported no conflicts of interest.