Thomas Gruca, Henry B. Tippie Research Professor of Marketing, Faculty Director of the MBA Marketing Career Academy, Tippie College of Business

February 6, 2015

“Trends in Medical Oncology Outreach Clinics in Rural Areas”

Biosketch: Tom Gruca is a Henry B. Tippie Research Professor in Marketing at the University of Iowa and faculty director of the MBA Marketing Career Academy. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois. His current research interests include marketing strategy, health care, and prediction markets.

Abstract: Providing access to cancer care for rural patients is a major challenge. One option is the visiting consultant clinic (or VCC) model. VCCs are regularly scheduled visits from urban-based specialists to rural sites (usually hospitals) wherein the visiting physician can provide some types of diagnostic, treatment and consultative services to patients in their local community. In this study, we focus on the long-run trends in medical oncology outreach in Iowa as well as the involvement of the 2011 Iowa oncology workforce in VCCs. We used data from the Iowa Physician Information System which tracks the practice locations of all Iowa-based physicians (including rural outreach sites). We modeled the growth patterns in the number of cities hosting medical oncology VCCs and the number of clinic days from 1989-2011. We also examined the impact of VCCs on access to cancer care for rural Iowans and the travel burden for participating medical oncologists. Two findings are of particular interest. First, access to cancer care in rural Iowa (i.e., number of clinic days) increased significantly in the post-Medicare Modernization Act period (after 2005). Second, in 2012, almost half of Iowa-based medical oncologists regularly participate in rural outreach. As a group, they travel an estimated 21,000 miles a month to provide cancer care to rural Iowans.