Dr Joseph Alvarnas: PCOC 2021 Brings Together a Wide Variety of Oncology Stakeholders

The Patient-Centered Oncology Care® (PCOC) conference, taking place in a hybrid format September 23-24, 2021, provides a space for oncologists, payers, health care system leaders, and others to delve into different possibilities to improve care, according to Joseph Alvarnas, MD, of City of Hope, editor-in-chief of Evidence-Based Oncology™ and co-chair of the meeting.

Transcript

Which stakeholders should plan to participate in PCOC?

The beauty of this meeting is that it really helps to empower stakeholders across the breadth of oncology. So we're not just talking about clinicians, we're not just talking about leaders of health care systems, but also the other essential members: those in pharma, those who are leading by helping develop pathways, those who are leading on the payer side by really exercising new levels of creativity in payment systems.

Part of the beauty of this meeting is that you have stakeholders who often have their own meetings and often have separate conversations, and what you find not only in the panels, but also in the breaks in between when people have a chance to visit and talk and chat—whether it's by a virtual means or an in-person means—you find this great cross-pollination of ideas and the general level of excitement that builds in that room as all of these diverse stakeholders, who fairly rarely engage in these kinds of conversations, go deeper and deeper into the future. The beauty of oncology is what makes it so exciting, the diversity of stakeholders, and the depth of conversations that they have around making our system much better.