Dr Ali McBride Details the Significance of His Presidential Theme in ACCC's 46th Annual Meeting

My presidential theme looked at the interdisciplinary care team involved in the actual delivery of cancer therapies and cancer care, said Ali McBride, PharmD, MS, BCPS, BCOP, clinical coordinator of hematology/oncology in the Department of Pharmacy at The University of Arizona Cancer Center and outgoing president of ACCC.

Transcript

For this year’s ACCC 46th Annual Meeting & Cancer Center Business Summit, you set your presidential theme as “Collaborate. Educate. Compensate: A Prescription for Sustainable Cancer Care Delivery.” What is the significance behind each term?

That’s 1 of the actual main themes—my president’s theme was actually look at the interdisciplinary care team involved in actually delivery of cancer therapies–also cancer care. So, we actually have collaborate, educate, and compensate, each have their own definition.

Collaborate: being members of the interdisciplinary team, and we actually have people from the nutrition support team, to our nurses, nurse practitioners, advanced care practitioners in these cases as well. We also have financial advocates, prescribers, and also pharmacists and social workers, just to name a few out there. We have this A to Z based definition of all those people who are collaborating on delivering cancer therapy to the appropriate patient. The names I've listed are just some examples of those people involved, but we can actually go on and on about endocrinologists who are focusing on cancer care, we can actually address social workers who are specific, and nurse navigators, who are really kind of earmarking themselves into that line of care for the overall healthcare delivery system. As we start to focus more and more on these, we see the evolution of that care team, which at 1 time could have just been the actual physician and the nurse—now being expanded, because the care delivery is becoming much more complicated, and we have to have people along the line of care to really integrate that piece. That's where collaborate comes from.

Educate: educating the members to understand what those actual services are. We're looking at nutrition support and nutritionists. There's a large model there in which we're actually addressing our patients, making sure those patients are continuing our therapies for treatment in which that includes food intake and other areas as well—that's how we do that, that's actually nutritionists. Social workers, their expansive knowledge base, working with many team members. Educating them on the actual delivery of services, but educating the actual administrators on what that service provides, because in many cases, we're working with a number of individuals. It could be oncology team members, they can be members of the actual personal team addressing care, like nurse navigators and several others. We can even look at, for example, caseworkers addressing that role too, and also financial advocates, and pharmacy technicians–all being in that actual team. However, when we're looking at that, many people are unaware of the cash delivery in the setting, and who's involved with that–that's educate.

We take a look at compensate: the last part of my president's theme. That’s really looking at members who are involved in the actual cancer care delivery, and how to address compensation for their time. Not so much reimbursement, as in many cases we deal with uncompensated care models in our system, and that actually occurs throughout many different pathways of actual touch points with our patients. It's really addressing the time devoted to those patients and how to actually hopefully in the future actually understand what that cost is. To look at reimbursement methodologies or even payment methods in the near future to address that level of cancer care in our healthcare delivery system. So, in looking through those pieces, we have a number of different players involved, pharmacy technicians, we have again psychologists or oncology psychologists in this case as well, and also even cardio-oncology to name a few. Again, we also have molecular pathologists, next year sequences pieces again for tumor burden. So, these are all part of the actual puzzle for the overall care model.