A Blog from the Lymphoma Program at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian
Lymphoma & Myeloma 2011: An International Congress on Hematologic Malignancies will be held October 20 to 22 at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. Weill Cornell’s Dr. John Leonard, Dr. Richard Furman, and Dr. Ruben Niesvizky are faculty chairs of the conference. The conference is a comprehensive forum presenting the most recent developments in lymphocytic and plasma cell neoplasms.
There is complimentary registration for Weill Cornell, NewYork-Presbyterian and Memorial Sloan-Kettering staff.
Weill Cornell’s Dr. John Leonard will be on the panel of experts participating in Cancer Care’s telephone workshop “Update on Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma” on Wednesday, October 5 from 1:30 to 2:30 pm, Eastern Time.
The workshop is free of charge. No phone charges apply. However, pre-registration is required to secure a place on the call. Click here for more information and to register for the workshop.
On September 23 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law a bill that requires health plans to cover orally administered chemotherapy treatments at a cost equal to intravenously or injected chemotherapy treatments. The bill will go into effect January 2012.
Traditional intravenous chemotherapy drugs administered in a hospital or clinic are often included as a medical benefit under a patient’s health insurance plan. However, many oral chemotherapies are defined as a prescription benefit and frequently require much higher out-of-pocket costs for patients, or they have been unavailable to patients with financial caps on their prescription benefit.
For lymphoma patients, oral chemotherapy agents that are sometimes used include cyclophosphamide (cytoxan), etoposide (VP-16), and procarbazine (matulane).
Regarding the new legislation, Dr. John Leonard, the Clinical Director of the Weill Cornell Lymphoma Program, said, “This is a very important law to allow our patients access to some of the crucial drugs that they need. A great deal of credit goes out to those who highlighted this issue for our legislators and asked them to take these steps. It speaks to the importance of having all of us take an active role in encouraging government policies that can improve outcomes for patients. “
New Developments in Lymphoma 