Kathleen Lokay: Implementing Value in Clinical Pathways

Via Oncology is taking several steps to implement value into clinical pathways programs, explained President and CEO Kathleen Lokay.

Transcript

How is Via Oncology working to implement value into clinical pathway programs?

It’s really at several levels. One is that we’ve always taken the approach that we want the committees if everything else is really comparable in terms of efficacy and toxicity, we want the committees to drive to the approach that is the least costly to the patient and the payer. So we’ve always incorporated value at that third test. What we’re also hearing from our customers is that they want more information to be able to have shared discussions with patients when maybe the thing that has better efficacy maybe has a price tag that is just too high for that patient. So we’ve developed a cost analyzer tool to let the physicians have access to the information in those shared decision-making situations.

And then the third thing is our committees are increasingly carving out patient presentations for not clinical presentations, but financial presentations so we may have a pathway branch for a patient who can’t afford the copay on an oral drug and will instead provide an IV alternative that has a lower copay or no copay so the committees have the ability to really create those more value based scenarios based on patient preference.

What we’re not doing, and I don’t know when we will, is we’re not asking the committees to decide whether three extra months of survival is worth a certain price tag. We don’t feel that there is a societal agreement on what that is today so we certainly don’t want to be asking our committees to be making that judgement call.