Amy Ellis Discusses Choosing Between Multiple Oncology APMs

With so many different oncology alternative payment models (APMs) available, choosing the right ones to participate in might simply mean finding which ones already align with what a practice is doing, said Amy Ellis, chief quality officer at Northwest Medical Specialties.

Transcript

Recently, the Community Oncology Alliance released a report that there are more than 30 oncology-related APMs. How does Northwest Medical Specialties determine which model to participate in?

There's a lot of different APMs out there. And what we really try to do is look at the quality measures that that specific APM is requiring, or that specific payer, and how it aligns with our current programs. We don't want to get into a situation where we have 15 different programs with 15 different quality measure rules and methodologies, because there is a lot of administrative burden that takes place behind the scenes of all of these APMs, whether that be, you know, billing out the MEOS [Monthly Enhanced Oncology Services], or tracking the patients—all of these different things.

So, what we really try to do is find out what's aligned with what we're already doing. And of course, there's some wiggle room. If there's something that's trying to introduce a new measure for us, or maybe has a slightly different methodology, we're open to that. But when you get into a space where you have these completely different models, that means you may need more staff to support those models. I think those are the really the key things that we look at is really alignment between the models.