Dr Michael Kolodziej Explains the Benefits of Aetna's Oncology Medical Home Program

Michael Kolodziej, MD, national medical director for oncology strategy at Aetna, said that the evaluation of academic medical centers has allowed the company to examine what lies at the heart of creating optimal patient outcomes and experiences.

Transcript (slightly modified)

Is Aetna evaluating payment pilot programs in the community oncology setting? And how has the response there been different from cancer centers?

So as many of your viewers know, we’re very actively engaged with predominantly community oncology programs. Our engagement is everything from the implementation of clinical pathways programs—which are typically on a geographic basis—to more intimate and collegiate relationships around enhanced care delivery, which we’ve called the “Oncology Medical Home” for lack of a better term. And we’ve been doing that really now for several years. We do have some data, and people internal to Aetna are quite excited about the results. We’ve even cut practices some checks around their performance.

Academic medical centers are a different beast and they’re a much more complicated and potentially untapped area for looking at care delivery or form and improving processes of care. So we have initiated efforts with Moffat Cancer Center and University of Chicago; we have a number of other academic centers that we’re engaging. That’s a really different delivery model, right? They’re comprehensive typically, they offer all clinical services, and they really do have a different care model.

It’s not better or worse than a community model, it’s just different and the opportunities, therefore, are quite different. I can start to ask really, really different questions about, for example, surgical oncology which is very hard to answer in the community setting. I can answer questions about coordination of care, I can answer questions about aggressively implementing palliative care services because these hospitals have palliative care services. Most community practices do not so it’s a different relationship, it’s a different business deal, but it does get to the heart of looking at the optimal patient experience and optimal patient outcome.