OneOncology’s Clinical Pathways Covers Best Practices for 90% of Patients, Says Dr Ted Arrowsmith

The disease groups that make up the OneOncology clinical pathways program cover 90% of patients with cancer and develop best practices for treating cancer in the majority of patients, said Edward “Ted” Arrowsmith, MD, MPH, managing partner and director of research, East Tennessee Division, Tennessee Oncology.

Transcript

What is the role of disease groups in the OneOncology clinical pathways program?

Our idea of pathways is to have them really be bottom up and then top down. We've instituted disease groups that cover about 90% of patients with cancer. They have experts from each of the 15 practices in OneOncology, and work collaboratively to develop the pathways to develop best practices for treatment of cancer for the majority of patients. Of course, there'll be some patients who being off pathway is the right thing to do, but this is the expert consensus. It then comes up to the clinical team at OneOncology, who does clerical work and other work, and then helps push that information back to every doctor practicing across the practices in OneOncology.

How do member practices of OneOncology work with these clinical pathways day to day? How will the OneOncology annual conference help practices learn more about working with pathways?

Our pathways process is relatively new. OneOncology is a new organization, and we've been working on pathways really diligently for about 18 months. The main way that we see providers working with the pathways will be through a tool called Flatiron Assist. And the OneOncology conference this weekend is the big kind of rollout of that tool. That's a clinical decision support tool developed in conjunction with Flatiron Health who's our EMR [electronic medical record] partner. Based on the intellectual work done by the disease groups [the tool] will guide clinicians to using a pathway concordant regimen, whenever they order. That can be customized by OneOncology based on value-based care, clinical trials, or other attributes that are unique to our practices.