Dr Olalekan Ajayi Discusses What Practices Should Do to Succeed Under the EOM

Olalekan Ajayi, PharmD, MBA, 2023-2024 president of the Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC), discusses several factors practices should have and questions they need to ask themselves if they are to succeed under the Enhancing Oncology Model (EOM) after the Oncology Care Model (OCM).

Transcript

What factors do you believe are most important for practices to succeed under the EOM, whether or not they participated in the OCM?

I think the first thing with EOM that most people are thinking about is, how is it going to impact my practice? One of the main things that other practices are beginning to do, particularly those who have been in the OCM—but if you're not an OCM practice, you can do this, too, as well—is better understanding the data around your population that you're managing, and being able to layer it on what it might look like if you are an EOM practice.

So if you're building that kind of model, what does that look like for me in my practice? And what are the things that we need to do in our practice to be successful? We have the opportunity right now to look at our existing data and to be able to layer it in that model. The second thing I would say is, when it comes to designing workflows within the practice, how can we design a workflow that makes us succeed? A good example is with patient-reported outcomes. How do we design a workflow around that that makes us successful as a practice and also helps us meet those requirements with EOM?

We are at a very exciting time in cancer care. We have new emerging technologies that are going to take us to places far beyond our imagination, which is really great. One of the things that I would always say is that as we begin to leverage these technologies, we need to think about not only developing our workforce, but how these technologies are going to impact access to care. So we need to be very mindful that people don't get left behind in implementing these new technologies. So I'm looking forward to being a part of that solution at ACCC. We are the how-to organization, and so that's what we've always done best.