Dr Sibel Blau on Data Sharing Within the Quality Cancer Care Alliance

The practices in the Quality Cancer Care Alliance (QCCA) are able to share data to improve the quality of cancer care delivered to patients, explained Sibel Blau, MD, medical oncologist at Northwest Medical Specialties, PLLC.

Transcript

How is the Quality Cancer Care Alliance sharing data and collaborating to contract with payers?

As a clinically integrated network, our goal is to go to the payers and tell them we provide a very unique and united value-based care path to our patients. And, yes, one of the major goals is to be able to contract with the payers. As far as the data sharing, we have created a data warehouse. Regardless of the EMR [electronic medical record]—not everybody is using the same EMR under QCCA—you can bring all this data into one area where the data can be shared.

We have done some data projects and we can share data, but we’re working on making a more robust data sharing, data reporting, and collecting going forwards. That’s going to be one of the main focus of QCCA.

What are some of the data projects the Quality Cancer Care Alliance has worked on?

Dr. Ray Page, from Fort Worth, Texas, and I shared a couple of projects. We were piloting a couple of projects. One of them was an artificial intelligence program. And we implemented this, actually, this year, 2018, and within a 6-month period we were able to show incredible savings in emergency room admissions, hospital admissions, and for my practice, what was the very, very phenomenal thing was improvement in our hospice referrals, pain management.

We also published a paper utilizing our triage pathways that happened because of the collaboration in QCCA. Something that we implemented with the help of, again, the Fort Worth, Texas, practice. Dr. Ray Page’s practice had the content of the triage pathways. We put then into a software with the help of Navigating Cancer, and that was provided free to all QCCA practices. So, by using that triage pathway, his practice and my practice showed significant savings in [emergency department use], referrals, hospitalizations, and admissions. We just published that paper, it’s being published.