Allina Health’s Mike Koroscik Addresses Oncology Innovations Rooted in the COVID-19 Pandemic

There have been many silver linings of the pandemic, including improvements in financial, operational, and clinical advancement efficiencies, as well as addressing the total cost of care in population health management, said Mike Koroscik, MBA, MHA, vice president of oncology, Allina Health and the Allina Health Cancer Institute.

Koroscik presented “Preparing for Population Health in Oncology” today on the final day of the Association of Community Cancer Centers’ National Oncology Conference.

Transcript

What has the COVID-19 pandemic taught us about changes oncology needs to make in strategic planning, financial and operations management, and process improvements?

As terrible as the pandemic has [been], it has also been a silver lining for so many innovation efficiencies needed for the financial, operational, and clinical advancements in oncology. For example, it devastatingly hurt the ability for screening of early cancer, but it made us also much more bearish to make sure that we are going to get people in earlier and really advanced our health equities work around those areas, too, which really forerunned the goals around population health. Before we were just dabbling in virtual health and doing e-visits; that became the standard, only to actually extend that now to survivorship and other aspects.

Another aspect is, Medicare at home or medical care at home was an idea, but now looking as we move to population health, that is one way we’re addressing the total cost of care—only cracked open, too, because of the pandemic. Also, all the other components of population health, such as ER [emergency room] or ED [emergency department] utilization, we’ve talked about it, but now we know that through enhanced navigation and that, let’s really deal with the cost of care.

Can you discuss ways in which physician leadership models and the transition to population health reimbursement intersect?

There are amazing intersections in population health. First of all, I’m excited about population health because we are truly going to get to the core of primary care and other specialty intersections in achieving our targets, such as screening; for example, lung cancer screening. Catching lung cancer at its earliest, most treatable stage, it has been a core of many cancer services. But now we can say this is truly one of the most amazing population health initiatives around.

As programs right now probably find themselves in a schizophrenic reimbursement atmosphere—one foot in volume, one foot in value and even population health—I think it’s that time to really go in the new direction that many of the initiatives and programmatic improvements both financially and operationally will make sense now within the population health model, really to achieve everything else as we leave volume-based reimbursement.