Dr Michael A. Choti: Integrated, Multidisciplinary Cancer Care Management Crucial for Value-Based Medicine

On June 20, 2024, Michael A. Choti, MD, MBA, Banner MD Anderson, co-chaired the second annual Advancing Value-Based Oncology Care meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. In an interview with The American Journal of Managed Care^®, Choti touched upon the goals of this year’s event, as well as some of the crucial challenges and considerations of value-based oncology care.

This transcript has been lightly edited

Transcript

How would you characterize the goals of, or biggest takeaways from, this second annual Advancing Value-Based Oncology Care event?

Oncology is challenging. It's expensive, it requires integration. I think a message here that we've learned is really the importance of the complexity of [value-based care], of managing cancer care in an integrated way, controlling costs. So, this meeting really highlighted how others are doing it. At Banner MD Anderson, we're an organization that's clearly moving in that direction; we showcased the direction that we're going in in this space, and I think it really made for a very exciting symposium again this year.

In your opinion, what are the most critical components that need to be in place for value-based oncology care to be successfully implemented?

The critical components to move toward value-based care, as you've heard in this conference as well, is really the creation of integrated multidisciplinary cancer management; informatics and good analytics in order to really understand cost, utilization, best practice; as well as opportunities to address disparities and care for everyone.

How can health care systems balance the cost of innovative cancer treatments with the principles of value-based care?

I think one of the challenges of cancer care is really balancing the cost of cancer care with the principles of value-based medicine. This is a challenge. How can we address this, and what are the ways we can? I think one is to leverage technologies: predictive analytics, information technology. Artificial intelligence, I think this will be an area that will support the direction of providing high-quality cancer care in the context of value-based care.