Redefining Value Metrics in Cancer Care: Coral Omene, MD, PhD

Value in cancer care can go beyond data points like overall survival and progression-free survival and can better represent what is important to the individual patient, said Coral Omene, MD, PhD, associate professor, Rutgers Cancer Institute and RWJBarnabas Health.

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

What measures outside of overall survival and progression-free survival do you want to see included in a comprehensive definition of “value” in cancer care?

I think it's something that is based on the idea of quality, and that may be different depending on the patient. It's really what is important to that patient at a particular time. I think you can find that based on quality-of-life–type values, and they actually may be very dependent on the patient, the age of the patient, [and] where they are in life. I think metrics that look at that and integrate that in a meaningful way that one can use depending on the patient population, I think would be a good idea.

What role can real-world data and analytics play in informing our understanding of value and tracking the impact of different interventions and policies?

That’s what's good about trying to get all these systems in place to assess for value-based care. It leans heavily on data, and analyzing all of this data and all of the metrics, and what that can do is inform us: What does the data say? Where do you get the best outcome based on the certain metric. Based on that data, we can then tailor how we care for the patient.

There is value in that, and you can see that, but there's also the other side too, where not everyone, or every practice, necessarily, is set up to do that. While larger practices and big health care systems may be able to do that and use those tools to advance care, you can see how it can cause disparity in communities [and] rural areas where they don't have access to that and are not able to get the data to translate into meaningful outcomes for their patients.