Dr Sibel Blau Discusses the Role of the Quality Cancer Care Alliance

As the first clinically integrated oncology network, the Quality Cancer Care Alliance (QCCA) brings together the best practices and shares knowledge on value-based care, said Sibel Blau, MD, medical oncologist at Northwest Medical Specialties, PLLC.

Transcript

What is the role of the Quality Cancer Care Alliance and what are you trying to accomplish?

Quality Cancer Care Alliance is actually the first clinically integrated network in oncology in the United States right now. We established QCCA in September 2015, although the work creating this organization started a year prior. Northwest Medical Specialties is a founding member of QCCA. We started QCCA with the intention to bring like-minded practices together to share the best practices, to create a research network, possibly do some aggregated drug purchasing, although understanding that’s not the future. But share all knowledge and experiences together.

At the end of the day, really bringing all the best practices and the quality of care to our patients to our clinicians and provide a good environment for independent practices that have a lot of challenges. Over the last 3 years, we realized that getting together a nice big organization and sharing all this is great, but it’s not enough. We are loosely affiliated, therefore we need to move toward the future with really focusing on one thing and only one thing, which is value-based care.

So, Quality Cancer Care Alliance has become a clinically integrated network to be able to bring diverse practices throughout the country—including, Hawaii; we have a practice in Hawaii—and bring in all these in a legal entity, without needing to be a single tax ID from different states and working together with the goal of creating a value-based care organization.

Most of our practices are either [Oncology Care Model] practices or they have done medical home, or they are very interested or well equipped to provide value-based care. So, now, all we need to do is really put this together and become a robust, united value-based care organization. That’s what we’re working towards.