Stuart Genschaw Discusses His Practice's Transition Towards Implementing the OCM

As Cancer & Hematology Centers of Western Michigan starts to participate in the Oncology Care Model (OCM), it has dedicated its resources to understanding the model and analyzing data, said Stuart Genschaw, executive director of the Cancer & Hematology Centers of Western Michigan. Throughout this process, however, the practice’s main focus is always on “providing great care” to its patients.

Transcript (slightly modified)

Are you participating in the Oncology Care Model and does your clinic have other value-based payment models in place?

Yes, so Cancer & Hematology Centers of Western Michigan is participating in the OCM model. We’ve been also actively involved in oncology care model in West Michigan with the local payer, Priority Health. We’re going into our third year of that payment model. We have changed it though, it’s evolved into more of an OCM actually, we’ve decided to mirror our oncology medical home to OCM.

What has been the biggest strain on the Center’s budget when adopting to the Oncology Care Model?

Right now it’s understanding and having the resources to understand it, so we’re dedicating a lot of the management time to focus on OCM and we are beginning to augment now the team. We’re getting more social workers, we’re looking at data analytics, people who can manage the data. As a practice, of course our focus has been the patients and providing great care, but now with all the data and trying to understand the data I think we need to augment our data team to analyze the data.

What other specific training have you done with staff to prep and continue to move forward with the Oncology Care Model?

So there’s been general educational meetings taking place to educate the employees and the physicians to make sure we’re 100% on board. It’s more forward-looking because right now we’re so busy check-marking the boxes that we are doing things, we haven’t gotten to the practice transformation yet, and I think that’s where a lot of work still needs to be done. But right now it’s understanding the model, making sure we are meeting certain requirements, and now it’s beginning to implement the changing workflows, and that’s some of the bigger challenges.