Dr Michael Kolodziej Weighs the Pros and Cons of Government Influence on Payment Reform

Some of the health policies coming out of Washington, DC, are clever, but there might be too much coming out for practices to keep up with, said Michael Kolodziej, MD, vice president and chief innovation officer at ADVI Health, Inc.

Transcript

Is the fact that there is so much payment reform coming out of Washington, DC, a good thing or a bad thing?

It’s so interesting because not a week goes by that something comes out. And in my other jobs in my career I didn’t spend very much time thinking about Washington. Somehow I got into this job now where I spend a lot of time thinking about what happens in Washington. I love the concept that people are willing to talk about disruption. I think some of the ideas that are coming out haven’t been fully thought through. I think some of them are kind of clever. I think there are unintended consequences and I hope they’re wise enough to ask people who are open-minded and thoughtful, and well-versed about what the unintended consequences are before they pull the trigger, so to speak.

I call it job security actually because everybody wants to know what I think about this, and so that’s really good. But I think practices can’t possibly keep up with this. There’s too much going on and trying to understand how it would affect me in upstate New York or wherever. I think there will be a shockwave in oncology, community oncology, even hospital-based and academic programs because these programs, they’re cross-cutting. They affect everybody. OCM affected everybody and IPI will affect everybody, CAP will affect everybody so we’ll see how it plays out.