Dr Jeff Patton Highlights Challenges Encountered With Implementing OCM

Implementing the Oncology Care Model (OCM) has presented several challenges, such as manually submitting data, keeping up with status of therapy, and billing, said Jeff Patton, MD, CEO of Tennessee Oncology.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What challenges has your practice encountered with implementing OCM?

Reporting is very difficult, for us it’s basically manual. We just submitted our data and it took [full-time employees] 6 months to abstract the data, so that’s a challenge. Just keeping up with when folks are on therapy, off, when they go on and come off of an episode. Billing for orals is a challenge because sometimes those are filled elsewhere so we don’t know what the fill date is, and so how do you fill out a fill date when you don’t know?

I think another big challenge is with novel therapies. We do a lot of clinical research so our docs tend to adopt new technology, new therapies quicker, and in this program apparently that’s a bad thing. We think it’s a good thing, but we think we’re getting penalized for that. And then last, the lack of having real time data feedback on both quality measures and on the financial impact. You know, 18 months is a long time to wait for feedback.