Dr Basit Chaudhry: How Practices Can Take Advantage of the Delay to Oncology Care First

With the start of Oncology Care First (OCF) being delayed, practices participating in the Oncology Care Model have more time to set themselves up to success when they transition to OCF, said Basit Chaudhry, MD, PhD, founder of Tuple Health.

Transcript

How can practices take advantage of the delay of moving to Oncology Care First (OCF), to take what they've been learning while participating in the Oncology Care Model to make a smoother transition and be successful in OCF?

I think participating these models, there's just a number of different goals that you want to be explicit about and have in mind, and one of them is to essentially learn how to build new capabilities and putting processes in place. These models are just so complicated to implement and the change is so big, I think this interim period is a really good opportunity to focus on embedding more high-quality processes in place around value, building capabilities and infrastructure. And I think it's also a really good time to try to do what is constantly needed and really hard to do, which is create engagement with physicians. I think, you know, now, because downside risk you could have opted out of it, this is like a window in which you can do that.

And I think kind of more broadly, from a strategic standpoint, I think in order to move to value and stay as an independent practice, one of the trade-offs or decisions you have to make is, how are you going to reconceptualize yourself as a cohesive practice? And what I mean by that is, you know, historically, physician practices, oncology practices, could roughly run as a series of more or less independent structures are fairly independent structures, where each oncologist was kind of operating and kind of their own way. But I think particularly where treatment is going, the issues related to total cost of care, how you think about practicing as a whole as a true integrated group is one of the big questions in the future. And I think, having that conversation or thinking through what that architecture looks like now would be, I think, a very prudent thing to do.