Dr Michael Kolodziej Explains the Importance of APMs

Michael Kolodziej, MD, vice president and chief innovation officer at ADVI Health, discusses the importance of oncology practices participating in alternative payment models (APMs).

Transcript:

What were some of the highlights from your panel on payment models?

So, I was fortunate enough to moderate a panel today on alternative payment models (APMs). We had a representative from Moffitt Cancer Center, a representative from the Memorial Healthcare System, and a representative from Florida Cancer [Specialists]. So that’s great because those are 3 very different practice settings all of whom are knee deep in APMs.

Two of the 3 are involved in the Oncology Care Model (OCM). Moffitt is not in the OCM because they’re a [prospective payment system] PPS-exempt hospital and were not allowed to participate.

But I think the take home messages were that overall the OCM has been a positive experience for the 2 groups that participated. They’ve learned a lot about how to optimize care delivery, they’ve looked at where they could improve care, they looked at the opportunities to improve the patient experience, and at the same time [were] cognizant of cost.

So, I would say one of the important takeaways was that for practices who were in the OCM, they would do it again, and that’s important. The second thing was that all 3 groups are participating in other APMs, and that is really good news. I think when the OCM was launched it was somewhat disappointing that so few commercial payers chose to participate. I was at Aetna at the time and we did choose to participate, but very few commercial payers did choose to participate.

Nonetheless, all three groups that we had on our panel today are participating in APMs, and that’s good news because I believe that the knowledge gained, for example, in the OCM is transferable to these other models, and our panelists said as much.