The National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN), Pfizer, and EMD Serono are collaborating to offer a new grant opportunity to support Quality Improvement projects that will advance the quality of care, including guideline concordant care, and best practices around treatment for patients with Metastatic or Advanced Bladder Cancers.
The intent of the RFP is to encourage NCCN Member Institutions and non-NCCN Member Institutions to submit letters of intent (LOIs) describing concepts and ideas around how to improve the quality of care, including guideline concordant care, and best practices around treatment for patients with Metastatic or Advanced Bladder Cancers. A successful project will incorporate quality improvement methods to overcome identified barriers to improve care. These barriers include, but are not limited to, identifying clinical and treatment related factors, patient-related psychosocial factors and healthcare system or technological related barriers.
Surgically unresectable metastatic bladder cancer remains largely incurable, with few patients surviving more than two years. Real-world studies suggest that 40%-65% of bladder cancer patients are not receiving front-line therapy and, many that do, are not offered second-line or subsequent therapies despite the benefits of survival with these treatments. Less than 40% of patients receive platinumcontaining chemotherapy although they meet the eligibility criteria for this therapy.
Despite the development of maintenance therapy, agents with improved toxicity profiles, and the approval of frontline immunotherapy, many patients are still unable to access these treatments. One reason is that the patient population is predominantly geriatric with co-morbid conditions who are unable to tolerate the toxicity of, or are ineligible for, currently available standard treatments. In addition, the implementation of technology for accessing medical care through devices may be challenging for this population. Other reasons include socioeconomic factors, including minorities, and those in zip codes which are health care deserts who may find access to standard treatments and clinical trials challenging.2, 3 Education of clinical teams, patients, caregivers, and healthcare systems is needed to improve the implementation of available, and recommended treatment options, in order to support guideline concordant care.4 Furthermore, best practices to improve the quality of care may include the use of pathways, navigation, expert care review, real-time guidance, shared-decision making, care planning workflows, and patient reported outcomes (PROs).
This RFP model employs a 2-stage process: Stage 1 is the submission of a 3-page LOI. If an LOI is selected, the applicant will be invited to Stage 2 to submit a full program proposal into Pfizer’s webbased system.
LOI Submission Deadline: May 26, 2022
Geographic Scope: United States
• Academic and Community Centers (Principal Investigators from Academic Centers are encouraged to include a co-investigator from the community) • Patient Advocacy Groups • Open to any type of care delivery system with the exception of small, physician-owned group practices • Health care professional organizations and other organizations with a mission related to health care improvement • Health technology companies must partner with a health care delivery organization and the health care delivery organization must be the lead applicant
• There is $1.2 Million available for funding of all projects. • The intent is to fund individual projects capped at $300,000 (direct and indirect costs) although smaller, lower-costs projects are encouraged. Funding greater than $300,000 will be considered for exceptional proposals with detailed budget justification.