Dr Kashyap Patel Highlights COA's Focus at 2023 Community Oncology Conference

Kashyap Patel, MD, gives a preview of what Community Oncology Alliance (COA) will be focusing on at the 2023 Community Oncology Conference.

Transcript

What are you looking forward to at the 2023 Community Oncology Conference?

This year's COA meeting is going to focus on multiple issues of public interest, beginning from what's happening in the 340B space, what COA is doing in a congressional effort to address the PBMs (pharmacy benefit managers). Because we all understand that the US health care space is quite complicated, with multiple factors beginning from the state, the local, the commercial payer, the Medicare Advantage plans, the MCO (Multi-Criteria Optimization). So all of this makes the space very complicated, and combine that with 340B and health care equity issues.

COA's effort is to try to bring the stakeholders from multiple areas—from the payer space to the provider space to the pharma space—to bring almost like a coalition of like-minded people together that combines the science, the ethics, morality, public policy, and the steps that COA has been taking to ensure that we remain constantly engaged and share information, of COA's bold and widespread effort, beginning from Congress to state level, to ensure that we extend the cause which is advocating for committee oncology policies and patients. We remain united in our efforts to be spokespersons for patients and the providers. In the same token, we also take the leap of ensuring that access to care—which is provided at multiple practices in a smaller rural area, where if we disappear, there will be no access—stays as what it is.