Experts Highlight AI, Innovation, and Collaboration as Key PCOC Takeaways

On September 25 and 26, oncology experts came together in Nashville, Tennessee, for this year's Patient-Centered Oncology Care conference. Over the course of 2 days, 15 panel discussions explored topics aligned with this year's theme, "Finding Our Rhythm: Embracing Change in Oncology Care."

Throughout the meeting, The American Journal of Managed Care^® spoke with experts about their biggest takeaways:

• Ryan Haumschild, PharmD, MS, MBA, CPEL, vice president of ambulatory pharmacy at Emory University and Winship Cancer Institute
• Scott Soefje, PharmD, MBA, BCOP, director of pharmacy cancer care at Mayo Clinic
• Mark Fendrick, MD, director of the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design at the University of Michigan and co–editor in chief of The American Journal of Managed Care
• Vivek Subbiah, MD, chief of early-phase drug development at Sarah Cannon Research Institute
• Sophia Humphreys, PharmD, MHA, BCBBS, executive director of pharmacy at Providence Health

This transcript was lightly edited for clarity; narration and captions were generated by AI.

Transcript

Narration: The Patient-Centered Oncology Care^®, or PCOC, conference was held last week, on September 25 and 26, at the JW Marriott in Nashville, Tennessee.

To gain deeper insight into this year's meeting, The American Journal of Managed Care^® asked experts to share their biggest takeaways. These included the rapid pace of change in oncology care and the growing role of artificial intelligence, or AI.

Now, hear directly from the experts themselves as they reflect on the key themes and standout moments from this year's PCOC conference.

What is your biggest takeaway from this year's PCOC conference?

Haumschild: PCOC has been great. I think one of the great things about PCOC is it's so different year to year, because things are developing so quickly. The topics are relevant around policy, innovations in pharmacy, and innovations in medical care.

One of the biggest, I would say, key things that has stood out to me is, number one, we're focusing on how do we have more provider-payer-manufacturer relationships? How do we drive innovation and care around precision medicine and pathway development?

I think, lastly, really, just to top it off, is, how do we think about new deliveries of care? Not just in hospital-based areas but also in ambulatory infusion suites, leveraging home infusion more. I think this provides multiple ways to improve access but, at the same time, drive that deep value that so many people are looking for.

Soefje: I think this year, from PCOC, there's a lot of focus on AI talk and how AI is going to integrate through all levels of oncology care. I think when you partner that with the talk on precision medicine and the focus of personalizing care, I think we're going to see some synergies there. How do we take the data that's coming in from genomic analysis, [and] precision medicine-type analyses and convert it to information using AI technology to then allow the people to make the right decisions moving forward? That's been kind of a filter segment through the whole thing.

I also think that there's a big focus on complex therapies right now: bispecifics, CAR [chimeric antigen receptor] T-cell therapy, [and] theranostics. All of these things are very complex and very costly therapies, and how are we going to handle them across the continuum?

Particularly, how do we get some of these moved out into the community practice so that it's not only the academic centers that are doing it? Then, which therapies should remain in the academic center because they require a level of specialization that may not be available in the community or cannot be delivered in the community, for whatever reason? I think, long-term, eventually, most of these things will be in the community. It's just going to take some time for all of it to evolve.

Fendrick: The big takeaway from PCOC, as it is everywhere, is, in the field of cancer—as it is in many other clinical areas—change is constant. Change is on the horizon, and the more that we engage the key stakeholders in the delivery of care, this goes beyond patients and clinicians. This includes administrators, this includes those who understand the large delivery networks, the pharmacy benefit managers, and the payers, who are all here at the session today.

The more we have collaborative discussions, even if there are potential disagreements on some minor levels, it's really nice to see that everyone wants to put the patient first.

Subbiah: The greatest takeaway from this PCOC conference is that there is so much to do in so little time, and we have a lot of work to do in terms of AI. We cannot say that AI is not impacting clinical care research. AI is impacting clinical care and research.

I think many of the clinics have shown that AI is being incorporated into dictations, into billing, into peer-to-peer review, and all that. But I think the next phase, in the next 2 [or] 3 years, AI is going to help us make clinical decisions. Assist us, assist oncologists make clinical decisions more efficiently, [and] assist oncologists in searching through peer-reviewed literature more efficiently so that we can deliver the right medicines to the right patients.

Humphreys: I have seen a really tremendous focus on the managed care approach for oncology. This is from our pharma friends, from our payer friends, and from our health system leaders, as well.

I think this is really a new beginning for us to all work together in this pretty challenging environment to reduce total cost, increase patient care, and really level the playing field for all ethnic groups.