Dr Ryan Huey Discusses the Necessity of Teamwork in Value-Based Oncology

Ryan Huey, MD, gastrointestinal medical oncologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, discussed the vital roles multiple health care providers play in improving outcomes for patients with cancer.

Transcript

How can value-based care in oncology improve clinical outcomes related to cancer treatments?

Oncology is a team sport. It doesn't just involve the physician and the nurse taking care of a patient. It's not just about a surgical intervention or chemotherapy. It's about the whole patient and everything that we're able to do for that patient. Truly, to advance value-based care in oncology and think about improving outcomes, we need to think about each and every way that we can touch a patient. Many of these are ways that we have not thought about traditionally in medicine. We need to expand the use of social workers and have earlier goals of care conversations, earlier advanced care planning. We need additional navigation and coordination of care. We need expanded access to dieticians for nutritional support. We need earlier palliative care for patients with both early and late-stage cancers so that we can better manage symptoms along the way, and we need to coordinate all of this. It's a very complex system, but very much oncology is a team sport, and so we need all of those players to play their role.