Aaron Lyss Highlights Early Lessons of the Oncology Care Model

Aaron Lyss, director of value-based care for Tennessee Oncology, discusses the lessons that’s were learned after experiences with the Oncology Care Model.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What are some early lessons from the Oncology Care Model (OCM)?

I think there are some early lessons from the OCM that aren’t new things that we didn’t know before, but things that we’ve been able to see in our experience in the model that have confirmed that a lot of our thinking on our strategy for our we’re going to be successful and OCM is on the right track.

One is the importance of palliative care, both in terms of managing patients with the highest symptom management complexity—how we manage the most complex care requirements that our patient population has—that’s going to be an important aspect of our success in the model. Then also managing the psychosocial factors that patients face outside of the circumstances of their cancer treatment—you can’t decouple those things. The environment the patient goes home to when they leave the clinic needs to be as much a concern for us as how they present when they’re in the office.

I think those 2 factors, I’m not going to say that we didn’t anticipate that they would be important but I think it’s one of the things that we’ve been able to confirm is going to be critical to our success in value-based payment programs.