Toward improving the quality of cancer care: addressing the interfaces of primary and oncology-related subspecialty care.

This supplement explores how the interfaces between primary and subspecialty care for cancer provide insights that could help close the gap between what is known about good medicine and what is done in medical practice. The articles presented here started as a discussion of cancer care among primary care and subspecialty care providers in the United States and Canada at the October 2007 North American Primary Care Research meeting in Vancouver, Canada. The discussion highlighted the challenge that simply providing coverage and a system to obtain care does not insure closure of the chasm between what is known and practiced in medicine. We hope that sharing this discussion and expanding the scope of our considerations will contribute to closing the quality chasm identified by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in its 2001 report, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century (1).

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