Even though Medicare’s Oncology Care Model (OCM) will sunset shortly, value-based care is here to stay. The ever-escalating costs of healthcare, the aging U.S. population and drive toward patient-centered and personalized care are just several factors that make value-based care and contracting inevitable. Healthcare spending is unsustainable, and patients and payers are actively seeking to better understand the costs of their healthcare and how to choose care delivered from more consumer-friendly healthcare delivery systems.

The Right Partnerships Drive the Right Care at the Right Time

In oncology, the march toward value means multidisciplinary partnerships need to be at the forefront of creating payment reform. Practices need scale. They also require the right clinical leadership and portfolio of value-enabling tools and analytics to succeed in risk-based arrangements intended to improve quality while lowering costs and enhancing the patient experience.  

OneOncology partner practices have a deep commitment to innovating in value-based care. From Astera Cancer Care’s Episode of Care Program for early-stage breast cancer to Tennessee Oncology’s Oncology Medical Home program, OneOncology’s partner practices have a long track record of success that will prove incredibly valuable as oncology care enters a new phase of value-based care.  

Past is Prologue

Why is the past important to success in next generation value-based care? No practice – from a five to a five hundred doctor group – can flip a switch and declare they will succeed in risk-based contracting. Rather, successful participation in value-based care requires years of effort readying your organization, developing best practices, incorporating sophisticated technology and analytical capabilities and ultimately, implementing programs that enable success.  At each step of the way, sophisticated practices must continue iterating and optimizing their value-based care delivery platform.

While the OCM didn’t meet its goal to generate overall savings, labeling it a failure is shortsighted. Beyond the savings many practices generated (Tennessee Oncology alone saved Medicare over $5 million in total spending during the most recent annual performance period), the OCM should be remembered for what it taught oncologists. It is the lessons learned over the course of many years in the OCM, and the ability of physicians to think more deeply about the way they deliver care, that will further empower success as value-based care moves forward. As Medicare’s OCM sunsets and its successor, the Oncology Care First model remains over the horizon, physician practices that are creating programs with payers, employers and other providers, as well as empowering their physicians with point of care, value-enabling tools will be the groups who ultimately succeed. And success in value-based contracting begets success since what a practice learned serves as the path forward for how it can thrive in subsequent risk-based programs.

Empowering Capabilities of the Platform

Success in value-based care isn’t just knowing how to integrate and deliver comprehensive cancer care services, it’s also about scaling the delivery of real-time evidence-based care to every oncologist in an ecosystem. That’s why OneOncology has created a comprehensive platform to empower our practice partners for success in value-based care programs. Our platform gives physicians the point of care tools, assets and capabilities to deliver advanced therapeutics and clinical trials for practices participating in value-based contracts.

Through the integration of technology into clinical pathways, precision oncology, clinical research and palliative care, OneOncology’s clinical network is providing the physicians with point of care decision-making support tools that empower providers to drive the highest quality treatment for each patient at the right time. Some of the tools OneOncology’s clinical team is operationalizing for its physician partners that translate into value-based care include:

• Pathways: Multidisciplinary oncology care pathways are essential components of value-based care. Oncology pathways are evidenced-based, standardized yet personalized, clinical decision support tools integrated into the electronic medical record to facilitate treatment selection at the point of care. These pathways ensure that OneOncology’s clinicians are empowered to deliver the highest quality care.
• Precision Oncology: Comprehensive genomic profiling and biomarker testing to identify patients who might be eligible for a novel therapeutic are essential components of any value-based care program. The ability to seamlessly and efficiently deliver therapeutic options to physician partners so patients have access innovative care similar to what is delivered in an academic medical center is central to what OneOncology brings to practice partners.
• Clinical Trial Research: Access to clinical trials allows patients to receive novel therapies ahead of their time. In addition to bringing innovation to patients, clinical trial enrollment also empowers value-based care by offering more targeted therapies, which may lead to improved outcomes compared to standard therapy choices.  OneOncology offers practices access to the most impactful clinical trials and the operational support of high-quality clinical trial accruement across the platform.  
• Palliative and Supportive Care: By focusing on relieving symptoms and stress for a serious illness, palliative care improves a patient’s ability to go through medical treatments while also helping define what is most important to a patient throughout their treatment. Palliative care providers across the network meet regularly to discuss best practices and ways to improve access to palliative services for patients.

These represent just four of the value-enabling services OneOncology provides our practices to empower their success in value-based care. By enhancing these and other physician-empowering capabilities, the OneOncology platform helps position our partners for success. 

As it becomes increasingly more important to deliver the highest quality cancer care, physician empowered networks with a commitment to value-based care and patient experience will continue to define the most innovative care delivery models benefitting patients, health insurers and self-funded employers. OneOncology and our partner practices are uniquely positioned to lead the way and transform the way cancer care is delivered nationally.