COA's Shiela Plasencia on Improving Patient Care in Marginalized Communities

Shiela Plasencia, director of practice support, COA (Community Oncology Alliance), spoke on providing adequate patient care for minority populations at the COA Payer Exchange Summit.

Transcript

What innovative approaches or interventions have been successful in overcoming challenges to achieve tangible improvements in health outcomes for marginalized/underserved communities?

A couple of the things that I think of when I think of this question. One of the things that Dr. Ricky Martin spoke to on that panel—then at night, during the dinner discussion—was kind of this notion of taking a look under the hood, if you will. I really love this because I hadn't spent a lot of time really thinking about this but it completely makes sense when it comes to health—looking for opportunities within your own practice—to include others to either lead or take part in roles that would create a more diverse practice space and environment for patients and the staff. I thought that was really insightful.

When you're thinking about your hiring and training, focus on hiring and training to meet the needs of your patient population. It's going to be really important to understand your unique patient population and every independent community practice has their own unique patient population. So understanding that and then looking at how we can fill the roles that we have open to support that community that we serve. Whether it's language needs, seeing people from their communities, people that have an understanding of their cultures, all of that is going to help develop a center that's much more comfortable to the patients that they're serving. It just makes sense. It seems like such an easy thing to do but a little bit of a novel concept.

The other thing I definitely think about is looking at quality programs that really help support this type of work. When you think about COA/ASCO [American Society of Clinical Oncology]/OMH [Oncology Medical Home] program, that includes standards that really focus on increasing awareness, then taking action. As our practices in the community, you know, independent community oncology space, as those practices are deciding to work to achieve that kind of program certification, they're forcing themselves to delve into this space and specifically figure out, where do we have gaps? What do we need to do to meet this standard?Meeting that standard is going to create the environment that they need to have in place to treat their patients.

How can these findings be used to improve oncology care delivery at the population level?

I definitely think the work that we do will help us be able to better inform and develop programs as we move forward and support collaboration, specifically between payers, physicians, and community organizations. None of us can solve this on our own. There's so many different pieces of health equity and it means something different depending on who you are and where you are in that spectrum.

So using the information that we learned to help us collaborate is what I feel like is going to be critical if we want to improve this for our patients. Then, I think the information that we get from the work we do will help us to better understand our local SDOH [social determinants of health] resources and develop plans that can help include these in our care delivery.

I think about Alti [Rahman, MHA, MBA, practice administrator, Oncology Consultants] talking about the Houston market and that they are resource rich as outside entities that can help support patients that have SDOH issues and concerns. But you've got to understand what those resources are in your own immediate community and then figure out how you can utilize them in your processes to connect the patients. Then I think, again, supporting the programs, the work that we do will help support the programs like the ASCO/COA/OMH [program]. It will continue to grow and improve and gain momentum and just continuing to promote collaboration and innovation.