# Bring the oncologist to the local clinic by video and the drug to the local pharmacy

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-cost-travel-teleoncology/  
OnCo record `idea-cost-travel-teleoncology` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Travel and time off work are among the biggest costs families face; if consultations happen by video, blood tests locally and oral drugs by mail, most routine visits need no journey at all.

## Summary

Rural patients travel hours for a fifteen-minute review. Tele-oncology models (Australia's Townsville network, the US Veterans Health Administration) pair a remote oncologist with a local nurse or general practitioner, local laboratory draws and mail-order or local dispensing of oral drugs; infusions are given at the nearest capable site. Decentralised trial designs use the same infrastructure. Payment parity for video visits, which many payers made permanent after 2020, removes the main barrier.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-10
- Hypothesis: A hub-and-spoke tele-oncology model will cut patient travel distance for routine care by more than half and reduce out-of-pocket travel and lost-wage cost by a comparable share, with equal guideline concordance and survival.
- Rationale: Published tele-oncology programmes report equivalent outcomes and high satisfaction; the saving falls to patients, who are otherwise invisible in cost accounting.
- Proposed test: Regional implementation with patient-reported travel time and cost, visit completion, time to treatment and survival compared with the pre-implementation cohort.
- Maturity: being-tested-at-scale
- Actor: clinic

## Sources

- Medicare.gov: Telehealth: https://www.medicare.gov/coverage/telehealth

## Connected records

- technologies: [AI trial matching & clinical decision support](https://onco.cc/technologies/ai-trial-matching/)
- terms: [Financial toxicity](https://onco.cc/terms/financial-toxicity/)
- bottlenecks: [Fragmented care and guideline gaps](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-care-fragmentation/), [Most of the world has almost no cancer care](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-global-access/), [Trials enrol too few, too slowly](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-trial-enrolment/)

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