Dr Lalan Wilfong on Texas Oncology's Experience With the OCM

The OCM has been challenging for Texas Oncology as it has for all practices, said Lalan Wilfong, MD, executive vice president of Quality Programs at Texas Oncology.

Transcript

What has Texas Oncology’s experience with the Oncology Care Model been like thus far?

[OCM] has been challenging for Texas Oncology as it has for all practices. But it did stop and make us think about how to take care of patients and being more patient-centric than we ever have been before.

A lot of good has come out of the program for us. Things about having shared-decision making with patients, really thinking about the cost of care, having access for our patients in our clinics to avoid hospitalization’s and [emergency departments] has been very good for our patients and our patient care that we provide.

The things we’ve succeeded in, are simply those— making sure that we have access to our patients, making sure that we keep them out of the hospital and the [emergency department] and have done really well in those areas and have shown improvement over time in those areas for patient care.

We’ve done some very simple things for drug utilization— drugs are a big cost of cancer care– and we’ve done some very simple things for managing drugs and drug utilization, for example using pathways and looking at other drugs like antiemetics and growth factors and making sure we’re using those appropriately.

What were challenged with right now is that next step, that next hurdle where things get a little bit more complicated. I’ve feel like we’ve done the easy things and the things that are easy to rally around and do well with for the practice, but now we’ve got to start making some very tough decisions to make that next hurdle and really succeed in the program.