Dr Michael Kolodziej on Succeeding in the Evolving Cancer Care Landscape

We learn most when we have benchmarking and we can examine our own processes of care, explained Michael Kolodziej, MD, vice president and chief innovation officer at ADVI Health, Inc.

Transcript

What are some best strategies for practices to succeed in the evolving cancer landscape?

I wish I knew the answer to that question, because for whatever reason [Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation] has guarded the results of the [Oncology Care Model] like they’re a state secret, which is absolutely nuts if you ask me. I think we learn most when we have benchmarking and we can examine our own processes of care. A couple of things I think we have learned hospitalization for toxicity management should be never events. People should be managed in the outpatient setting whenever it’s at all feasible. I think we’ve seen a lot of standardization of that care.

Second, we’ve seen a wide-scale adoption embracing of the patient navigator as an important component of the care team. I think if you don’t have a navigator, you’re nuts and you need to implement a navigation function; it makes everything else work better down the line.

The third thing is, and this hasn’t been done quite as much, is that practices who have really started to focus on physician prescribing behavior and opportunities for tweaking that are going to do well. We know, for example, there are practices that went immediately to biosimilars; they’ve done really, really well. We have heard of practices that are signing up for pathways programs because they think they’re important.

I would say those 3 things are really important. The fourth one that we haven’t really seen yet, but I think we will see, are broad adoption of end-of-life programs, palliative care and end of life, because that’s an unmet need and there are solutions now that are out there.