Allina Health’s Mike Koroscik on Helping Patients Navigate Cancer-Related Financial Toxicity

We want to make it easy for our patients to manage and navigate the financial toxicity they encounter from their cancer care, and for that we provide foundation and copay assistance, as well as look at optimizing insurance coverage, noted Mike Koroscik, MBA, MHA, vice president of oncology, Allina Health and the Allina Health Cancer Institute.

Transcript

Can you discuss some initiatives Allina Health has to address financial toxicity in oncology?

I’m passionate about addressing the financial toxicity of cancer care. I can't control the cost of drugs and oftentimes, too, just the cost of health care, even though that is an impediment, too, of addressing the total cost of care. But what I'm proud to roll out is a robust and comprehensive patient financial navigation program. It's not only maximizing, for our patients, the use of outside foundation and copay assistance, but it's also looking at insurance optimization and other aspects to decrease the financial toxicity. We know from our internal studies, too, that our patients’ anxiety is higher around the financial aspects than it is even over the diagnosis itself.

So my goal is at all of our sites, both virtually and in person, to elevate through our software to make it easy to manage and navigate all the foundations to address the financial toxicity, which is also a population health initiative, too.