Dr Lee Schwartzberg Reflects on the First Year of OneOncology

Lee Schwartzberg, MD, FACP, executive director, West Cancer Center, looks back on the first year of OneOncology and discusses what's to come in the next year.

Transcript

Looking back on the first year of OneOncology, how has the partnership impacted both providers and patients?

The first year of OneOncology has been a tremendous growth opportunity for us as we’ve learned our core practices and we’ve learned how the patients flow and how the operations piece works, so we’ve now integrated a lot of the functions, particularly on the operational side so that there’s this smooth and consistent way operations are being done and the technology has been aligned.

We have the same OncoEMR system for our [electronic health record], we have the same billing system now the same revenue cycle management, enterprise management. So that now is standardized and we’re now focusing on the clinical piece, and we’ve spent a lot of time over the last 6 months figuring out where the pressure points are on our clinical enterprise and how we bring the practices together.

One of the things that’s been amazing to be is there’s so much excitement and so much expertise that varies from our practices and bringing all that together elevates all of our practices. So, we’re working now on pathways and we hope to hope a unified pathway component going forward into 2020. We’re very excited about a research network that we’ve heard from all of our partners is really important so that we can improve clinical access to clinical trials and to have more trials participate. There’s so many great drugs being evaluated now, we just need more access and we’re hearing from our manufacturers, we’re hearing from our practices, we’re hearing from patients, “Give us more opportunities,” so that’s a high priority for us in the next year as we move forward.

We’re working on a whole number of quality and value initiatives and each of these are a committee that we formed as part of our overarching leadership council called OneCouncil. Soo, we’ve established the operational piece now in the first year and moving full force into the clinical piece.