Dr Sibel Blau Outlines Changes to Her Practice to Prepare for OCM

Years before the Oncology Care Model (OCM) was implemented, Northwest Medical Specialties started preparing by making changes to the personnel in the practice, explained Sibel Blau, MD, medical oncologist at Northwest Medical Specialties, PLLC.

Transcript

As Northwest Medical Specialties has participated in the Oncology Care Model, what were the most important changes to how you deliver care?

Well, we had to prepare for the Oncology Care Model implementation and it took us a few years before starting OCM, and we had to go through a lot of changes in the practice. Everybody calls it, as you know, practice transformation. Some of the major changes were creating the personnel and the support system that we didn’t have before, including patient care coordinators, case managers, clinical nurse specialists, and we did have social workers, but we redesigned the whole program and they created a big value-based care team that worked together to provide seamless care.

We also had to educate the whole organization, anybody who touched patient care. The receptionist to research nurse to the providers and there was a lot of repeated education to make people understand that we’re going to provide the care in a different way, and that is going to affect their day-to-day workload, and it caused a lot of intense changes for some people’s parts—especially providers. And the technology did cause a lot of stress because we had to use OncoEMR, our electronic health record, in a way that we didn’t use it before. So, yes there were a lot of changes before and during the OCM.