Jennifer Atkins Explains How Blue Cross Blue Shield Evaluates Emerging Innovations in Cancer Care

Blue Cross Blue Shield utilizes data to drive insights into what works and what doesn't work in cancer care, as well as, delineating trends through our collaboration with provider specialties and organizations across the US, said Jennifer Atkins, MBA, vice president of Network Solutions at Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Transcript

How do we define what is working and what isn't when implementing innovations in cancer care?

Cancer care in and of itself is not unique when we evaluate the efficacy of a program. Data is where we really can drive our insights into what works and what doesn't work. One of the things that we do across all of the Blue Cross Blue Shield companies is use third party data sets to help us evaluate measurement in the area. This also helps us transparently communicate back with providers about what is working and what isn't working. Then they can evolve their practices and innovate in a way that makes sense between the payer, the provider, and of course keeping the member at the center.

How do you delineate what trends are growing in healthcare and what may benefit your patient base as a whole?

How we delineate trends is we pay a lot of attention to what's happening with CMS, HHS, but also work really closely with provider specialties and organizations across the country who do this work every day. We want this to be informed by clinicians at the bedside level. There's a lot of innovation going on between things that can be handheld by a patient to a clinical innovation, and we look at all of those things holistically, and work to make sure that those types of innovations are built into programs in a way that really does bring value to the overall equation—driving quality and then to the extent we enable cost savings as well.