Dr Joseph Alvarnas on the Speakers, Sessions to Watch at PCOC 2021

Joseph Alvarnas, MD, of City of Hope, editor-in-chief of Evidence-Based Oncology™, and co-chair of the meeting, discusses the takeaways that attendees at the 10th anniversary of the Patient-Centered Oncology Care® (PCOC) conference taking place September 23-24, 2021, can expect to hear about in the areas of patient care, payment and quality, and multidisciplinary collaboration among specialists.

Transcript

What sessions and speakers are you looking forward to hearing during PCOC?

The excitement of PCOC is not only anticipating those sessions, which, at the outset, look exciting, but it's also the sense of surprise that you find in sessions that bring something new and unexpected to your attention, or that challenge us as a group of industry stakeholders to think differently about the situation. I think the 3 sessions that stand out to me stand out for different reasons. The first that really excites me is this idea of thinking about the patient journey as this continuum, rather than simply components in which we give chemotherapy, or radiation therapy, or a procedure, or surgery. And this idea of transitions in care, I think, are really essential to master if we want to engage patients and families, and really restore a person to wholeness over an experience that, through its intensity, can be dehumanizing and disempowering.

The second session that excites me is that one of the challenges of our system is that how we pay for things actually matters. It leads us to build better and more effective systems of care and payment. And in panel 6, this whole idea of advanced alternative payment models, this idea of what happens with the data from OCM [Oncology Care Model], how it transforms into OCF [Oncology Care First], and how this new administration moves forward with that information, I think, can lay the foundation for a very, very exciting future in cancer care, one that's sustainable and also strives for unprecedented levels of excellence.

The third panel that's really exciting to me is this idea of best practices and integration across specialties, because oncology isn't practiced in isolation. It's really the ability to align many clinicians from multiple disciplines in the pursuit of caring for a patient in ways that can transform every element of that care. So I think this year's meeting is really exciting, and the opportunities, I think, are many to learn from our great panelists throughout.