Dr Basit Chaudhry Expects CMS to Take Feedback From the Field to Improve OCF

Feedback from the field is incredibly important when participating in new payment models like the Oncology Care Model, said Basit Chaudhry, MD, PhD, founder of Tuple Health.

Transcript

With Oncology Care First being delayed at least a year now, where do you see opportunities for CMS to make some changes to the model based on the ongoing challenges practices have reported in the Oncology Care Model?

One of the things that Medicare talks about quite a bit in these payment models, particularly through CMMI [Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation], is that they're learning models. And I think that's the very much the right spirit. You know, these kinds of changes are so complicated, even for an entity as large as Medicare, there's no way to get it right in the beginning. So, this whole tact of making things a learning approach, I think, is really critical. And I think it's very, very important to really think, from the payer perspective, really think carefully about what did work, what did not, and I know Medicare tries to do this, and then really implement those changes. And I think one of the big things that we've seen particularly for a model as complicated as OCM, is, I think, until you're actually living it and doing it directly, it's hard to know what it's like.

So, what we really hope is that feedback from the field is one of the drivers for change and OCF in the design. So, I think taking a human-centric or user-centered design approach towards the problem would be something I'd very much recommend and hope that we see payers do more and more.