Striking the Balance Between Cutting-Edge Oncology Care, Affordability: Brian Mulherin, MD

Providers must prioritize delivering patient-centered, high-quality, and cost-conscious care to ensure patients receive the treatment they need without facing financial hardship, according to Brian Mulherin, MD, hematologist-oncologist at the American Oncology Network (AON), during an interview Friday at the Patient-Centered Oncology Care® (PCOC) conference in Nashville, Tennessee.

He explored this topic further during the panel discussion "Outcome-Driven Oncology: What Matters Now to Patients, Practices, and Payers," with AON colleagues Alti Rahman, MHA, MBA, CSSBB; Steven Swart; Puneeth Indurlal, MD, MS; and Melody Chang, RPh, MBA, BCOP.

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

What do patients value most when it comes to quality of care and treatment outcomes?

Patients really want to be seen and treated as a whole, live person, not just as an assemblage of diseases and diagnosis codes. When facing a cancer diagnosis, the most immediate thoughts people are going to have are, "Am I going to still be alive? Am I going to be there for my kids? What's going to happen to me in the future? What about my finances?" That's going to be different in different segments of a person's life, obviously.

They want to get good, quality care, the best quality care that they can, up-to-date, cutting-edge care, but they also don't want to go bankrupt in trying to do it. Trying to marry these things together—quality care, trying to keep costs low, and trying to keep the patient at the center of it—that's what we do. It's a very hard challenge, a very hard balance to achieve, especially in the environment of today.

How can practices better align care with patient priorities without compromising clinical effectiveness?

You need to have a great team around you in order to do that. It really does take a village, or several villages. It's not just about being able to deliver the latest and greatest drug; that is only the start of it. This involves having adequate support from [advanced practice providers] and from the pharmacy.

Pharmacists play a crucial role in allowing us to deliver, especially some of these more complex, cutting-edge therapies, such as bispecifics, in the community setting. Also, support from other allied providers: mental health support, which is woefully understaffed and I think underutilized in oncology. Dietitians, physical therapy, patient support groups, all these sorts of things.

Then, you have to have the rest of the staff around you to make this all happen, including adequate support on the financing side. It's not just as simple as the patient coming in and now they're ready for their chemotherapy cycle one; there's a lot that goes into it.