Closing the Gap: AON on Whole-Patient Care and Payer Data

American Oncology Network (AON) is treating financial hardship as a clinical toxicity, rolling out behavioral health and distress screening across its practices, and reversing the flow of quality reporting so providers send data to payers, according to the AON leaders who spoke at The American Journal of Managed Care^®’s Patient-Centered Oncology Care^® (PCOC) 2026 in Nashville.

The comments came in the second of 2 podcast episodes recorded at the conference and hosted by Melody Chang, RPh, MBA, BCOP, vice president of pharmacy operations at AON.

Susan Sabo Wagner, MSN, RN, OCN, NEA-BC, vice president of clinical innovation at AON, had just finished a panel on toxicity management that began with financial toxicity. Treating it as a clinical issue, rather than a separate socioeconomic one, is “an important piece to actual clinical care,” she said. The panel also covered using electronic patient-reported outcomes as part of a clinical track rather than added data, especially for patients on chimeric antigen receptor T-cell and bispecific therapies who spend long stretches outside the office.

At AON, Wagner said, the network is partnering with a behavioral health company and adding distress screening across all its practices. The team also uses the area deprivation index to understand patients’ poverty and education challenges and plan resources accordingly.

“It has been just eye-opening to see what our patients are going through,” she said.

Alti Rahman, MHA, MBA, CSSBB, chief strategy and innovation officer at AON, said the network’s data give it something payers lack. Payers have claims, he said, but AON has clinical, social, and behavioral context across its entire network. Over the past few months, working with payer partners and data partner MIBA, AON has begun supplying quality measures instead of receiving them.

“We reverse that now,” Rahman said, noting that quality measures in value-based care have typically been built by payers and sent to practices. He said the shift is meant to inform new payment models and called it something that has “never been done.”

Rahman was headed to the PCOC closing panel on cancer care through 2030, which he said would center on building trust among payers, providers, and patients. He pointed to precision medicine, data transparency, and artificial intelligence as a potential “bridge builder.”

Asked for takeaways, Wagner said that for all the talk of artificial intelligence and clinical trial accrual, “none of it matters if patients can’t access it.” Rahman said practices of every size, from rural clinics to National Cancer Institute–designated centers, face the same challenge of keeping pace with new therapies.

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