To prevent a recall bias as much as possible, patients will be phoned two and four weeks after surgery as a reminder to fill in the diary.
While some plans will allow a doctor to immediately determine how much a patient will owe toward the cost of an expensive treatment, for example, taking into account how much the co-payments involved and how much of the patient's deductible has already been met, others will offer only the outlines of a customer's coverage.
Using a sophisticated set of if/then rules, UnitedHealth wants to predict how much a patient will cost the health plan over the next year.
For topical applications, it is difficult to capture dose, as it is unclear how much a patient will need to apply to the skin.
We note, however, that a much larger cohort of patients will be required to perform equivalence testing that is, to test whether the differences are within margins that can be considered "identical" in terms of clinical outcome55.
Hopefully, the VEDOSS study, which includes a much larger number of patients, will succeed in this task.
As we move forward to adjuvant therapy in GIST, a much larger proportion of patients will receive drug exposure and currently the ideal duration of adjuvant imatinib treatment in high risk GIST remains undefined.
On the other hand, a much larger number of patients will be spared the morbidity of axillary dissection, with risk of lymphoedema, seroma and paraesthesia of the ipsilateral arm.
Thus, the impact of these newer treatments on survival will become apparent when a much greater proportion of patients will be treated with the appropriate treatment, and perhaps the final cohort was too early in the evolution of NSCLC management to outbalance the above factors.
Patients will have much more information on who provides good and bad care, and will be encouraged to exercise enhanced choice to go wherever has the highest standards.
