The trend toward post-infusion outpatient care of patients treated with CAR-T | ASH 2025

The days when patients were required to spend weeks in the hospital after being infused with chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR-T) therapy may be slipping into the past.

"It's becoming increasingly common to do this in the outpatient setting," said Christopher Ferreri, M.D., referring to post-infusion care patients treated with CAR-T.

Ferreri, of Atrium Health Levine Cancer Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina, said that several large health systems are committed to providing CAR-T care on an outpatient basis. "I don't know that they would be a majority yet but I think it's going to trend in that direction." Ferreri said at Levine they are prioritizing patients treated with Carvykti (ciltacabtagene autoleucel) for multiple myeloma or with Breyanzi (lisocabtagene maraleucel) for lymphoma patients. Other large institutions have moved to outpatient care post-infusion for patients treated with Yescarta (axicabtagene ciloleucel), another CAR-T therapy for lymphoma.

Ferreri is the first author of a study presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology this past weekend that showed considerable cost savings if post-infusion care is delivered on an outpatient basis. The study, a small pilot, compared 19 outpatients to 19 inpatients. Using publicly available sources of cost data, Ferreri and his colleagues calculated that the median per-patient cost was $19,180 less for the outpatient group than for the inpatient group ($29,339 vs. $48,519). The main difference was the number of days the patients spent in the hospital (five days among the outpatient group vs. 10 among the inpatient group).

Ferreri said the growing use of CAR-T is partly responsible for the trend toward outpatient care. "It puts institutions in a bit of a bind," he said, as they try to find room for a growing number of CAR-T patients with a finite number of inpatient beds available.