First Lady Jill Biden on Wednesday convened executives from top health insurance companies and other related organizations at the White House to discuss new commitments to expand access to navigation services for cancer patients.
“Navigators guide patients and their families through the complex and daunting world of cancer,” Dr. Biden said during remarks at the top of the roundtable in the West Wing’s Roosevelt Room.
“They help patients with everything from scheduling appointments to keeping track of medications to coordinating things like transportation and child care,” she added. “When you have someone who knows the system by your side every step of the way, it changes everything.”
The White House this month announced that seven health insurance companies – which, when taken together, reach more than 150 million patients – agreed to use new codes to cover navigation services for patients, monitor the use of services across demographics, take note of the outcomes for those using them and back the standards for providing such care that are laid out in the Oncology Navigation Standards of Professional Practice.
The companies include Aetna, a CVS Health company, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, Elevance Health, Health Alliance Plan; Humana, Priority Health, and Select Health. Forty cancer centers and community oncology practices around the country committed to using the methods in a bid to bolster access to services as well.
“Ensuring pathways to cancer navigation services is a critically important step to overcoming barriers to essential medical care and improving overall health equity,” Dana Erickson, CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota said during Wednesday’s roundtable.
The first lady also touted the administration’s efforts to update medical billing codes to allow commercial health insurance companies to cover navigation. Under the previous codes, she said, insurers weren’t able to pay for such services.
“But for those codes to help the most people, insurance companies need to use them – that’s where you come in,” she said. “You’ve stepped forward – using these codes so that more of your members can benefit from the support that patient navigators provide.”
The White House also said Medicare began paying for certain navigation services this year.
Seven national health plan associations, according to the White House, also pledged to teach their member practices how to use the new codes to bolster navigation.
“It’s not just the right thing to do for patients, it’s also the right thing for your businesses,” Biden said on Wednesday. “Patients with navigators miss fewer appointments, are more likely to complete their treatment, and are less likely to need to go to the emergency room or be hospitalized.”
The effort is part of the administration’s Cancer Moonshot initiative through which President Joe Biden set the ambitious goal of reducing the death rate from cancer by 50% over the next 25 years.
Biden was tasked with heading up the Cancer Moonshot initiative when he was vice president under former President Barack Obama and reignited the effort when he assumed the presidency himself.
Biden pitched the effort as part of his “Unity Agenda,” a list of broad-consensus priorities he unveiled during his first State of the Union address. It’s also an issue close to his heart. His son, Beau, died in 2015 after battling an aggressive form of brain cancer.
“The Cancer Moonshot represents how powerful it can be when all the stakeholders in health care come together to improve the lives of people living with cancer,” Dr. Cathy Moffitt, the Chief Medical Officer of Aetna and Senior Vice President of CVS Health who also noted she is a cancer survivor herself, said.