National Oncology Conference—Keep the Conversation Going

Featured speaker Peter Bach, MD, MAPP, delivers the opening presentation of the ACCC National Oncology Conference.

By Amanda Patton, ACCC, Communications

From the opening presentation by featured speaker Peter Bach, MD, MAPP, to the final sessions focused on cancer survivors and the workplace and providing survivorship services on a shoestring budget—last week’s ACCC National Oncology Conference covered challenges large and small facing cancer programs and practices across the country.

Macro challenges—occurring at the health system and population health level—are well known to the oncology community. Among these are the high cost of cancer drugs and new therapies, the transformative shift in payment from volume to value, workforce shortages, reimbursement constraints, and the many issues tied to ever-increasing demands for data collection and reporting.

Micro challenges—occurring at the service line and individual provider and patient level—range from adapting delivery infrastructures to meet the evolving treatment landscape, to determining  metrics to track and how to best to communicate these to leadership, to ensuring patient access to supportive care services that remain unreimbursed, to fostering a holistic, patient-centric culture of care.

Common themes across conference sessions and conversations: Collaboration, integration, evidence-based medicine, and value.  Five key takeaways from the conference:

Cancer programs and providers must collaborate outside the box and across the care continuum.
Attendees heard first-hand from programs that are already making this work—from implementing virtual tumor boards, to engaging primary care physicians in survivorship care, to collaborating across disciplines to provide cancer prehabilitation services, and more.

There are formal & informal operational pathways to create integrated delivery networks with stakeholders for quality patient care.
Panelists in the Advancing Quality Care session agreed: to achieve a truly integrated delivery network transparency and trust between all partners is needed.

Oncology programs are increasingly turning to dynamic dashboards to demonstrate value to payers and patients.
Solutions and tools may exist outside the oncology service line. Reach out to the data analytics team or business intelligence team within your organization. Take advantage of or adapt existing resources and tools.

From personalized medicine to immuno-oncology, cancer treatment is undergoing a transformative shift.
For both providers and the patients they serve, the value proposition presented by genomic medicine is that it allows clinicians to make better therapeutic decisions.

Patients are key stakeholders in healthcare integration efforts.
“Successful integration will depend on aligned patient-centered care, patient-focused care, and patient engagement,” said ACCC President Elect Jennie Crews, MD, in the panel discussion on Advancing Quality Care.  Panelists touched on the findings included in a new ACCC white paper released at the National Oncology Conference that outlines forward-looking essential steps to ensure quality patient care in the increasingly integrated healthcare environment.

ACCC encourages members to keep the conversation going by sharing your key conference takeaways in our members-only online community ACCCExchange.

Save the date and join us in Washington, D.C., March 2-4 for the ACCC Annual Meeting: CancerScape 2016.