Dr Stephen Schleicher: We’re at a Turning Point in Oncology Care

In this interview from our recent Institute for Value-Based Medicine® meeting in New York City on February 8, Stephen M. Schleicher, MD, MBA, chief medical officer at Tennessee Oncology, discusses the present state of value-based oncology care and what the future may bring when the Enhancing Oncology Model (EOM) kicks off on July 1.

Transcript

What is the current state of value-based care in oncology, and what are some top priorities of the EOM that hope to improve upon the OCM?

We’re in this interesting, I call it almost an inflection point in value-based care in oncology. You have the Medicare models: OCM [Oncology Care Model], obviously, the large one, and then EOM coming, which is going to be much smaller, probably about half the patients. The devil is still going to be in the details. We’re still awaiting practice-specific baseline data to get a better understanding of how our practice, Tennessee Oncology, will do on that. We’re obviously very committed to value-based care but need to see the details.

But around that, things are changing. Medicare Advantage [MA] is blowing up. You saw the $10 billion Oak Street acquisition that just happened with CVS. All these risk-bearing entities that are not really touching oncology yet are growing up all around us, and what is the current oncology platforms’ play with that? The ones that are very invested in value-based care, they're gonna be new partnerships. And I'm not trying to speak ahead as if I know something that no one else knows, nothing like that. But you can imagine this ecosystem, where risk-based care is growing all around us—including the explosion of MA, which is capitated—and oncologists currently kind of in silo, understanding value-based care with OCM and all these medical homes. Ours is BlueCross, Astera has done a bundle with Horizon. So all these things happening and how does it come together one day.

That's what I'm excited about in value-based care. Over the next 5 years as these consolidated, value-based care, largely primary care companies that manage the entire population, how does cancer fall into that? That's where I think value-based care is really going to change over the next 2, 5 years, or even longer.