At this year’s Community Oncology Alliance (COA) Conference, a session titled, “OCM 2.0: The Universal Oncology Payment Model,” drew a very large audience. It outlined what COA sees as the primary issues with the current model and provided some suggestions for revamping it so that it is accessible to all cancer care providers.
Presenter Kavita Patel highlighted several things that COA thinks should be addressed in the next iteration of the program including expanding it beyond just chemotherapy patients, balancing drug innovation with appropriate use and guidelines, and addressing the uncertainties around risk adjustment.
Patel made an important point – if no one is willing to take on two-sided risk, alternative payment models aren’t going to be effective. Identifying what’s needed to get providers on board and willing to take on risk is especially important when thinking about how to improve OCM. The major points of emphasis for COA’s proposed “OCM 2.0” included:
- Transparency: an open model where stakeholders understand the measures and how results will be calculated
- Consensus: stakeholders, including patients, providers and payers, need to all be on board
- Clarity: providers will likely have to make a big investment in infrastructure, so make sure it’s clear what will be expected from them and why it’s a requirement
- Simplicity: duplicate past or current program elements that make sense – providers will already have some familiarity and won’t have to start from scratch
- Value: for not only services, but also drugs
She concluded with a now familiar notion: value-based care is here to stay – we must figure out how to deliver it.
Read more about this session at OBR: Hypothetical OCM. 2.0 Addresses Obstacles and Opportunities.