Bo Gamble Explains How COA Helps Practices Prepare for OCM

Bo Gamble, director of Strategic Practice Initiatives at the Community Oncology Alliance (COA), explains how COA plays a role in supporting practices in preparing for Oncology Care Model.

Transcript

How has COA played a role in helping smaller practices prepare for OCM?

We’re trying to create a platform for dialogue. What we’ve found historically—even Medicare, for example, is 50 years, it’s the same program over and over again—payers do the same thing over and over again. Even when you’re an employer and you’re like, "Here’s your benefit package," and you’re like, "Ahh" or "It’s okay, but the premiums are going up." We got to change this concept because we’re just going in the opposite direction.

So the notion of this program, and we have been working on reform now for 6 or 7 years, the [COA Payer Exchange Summit] is a platform is to engage the others. So if you’re part of a care team, the price of admission you must bring a payer or employer and if you’re a payer or employer looking for options you got to bring someone in from a care team. The concept is helping to bring down the walls and it’s exciting because we’re in a place where we’re talking about a place where we’ve never talked before. We haven’t figured it out yet but we’re making progress.

If you look at 6 years ago, the buzzword was pathways, pathways, pathways. It became a component, but it’s not the component. Which is good. There’s other things and we continue to get smarter about what we think’s important in care, in quality, in value and we’re starting to agree on come components. Now the trick is let’s do it efficiently, so it’s the same model, we’re just changing how it’s looked. We have to change optics because there’s still those little fires that pop up, that says, "Here’s what we’re doing," and their motive and their incentive or their understanding is just way off base. So we have a lot of education to do.