NYOH’s Doyle on Joining OneOncology: What We Value the Most Is Culture

This week, New York Oncology Hematology (NYOH), a 30-year-old cancer care practice in the Albany, New York, region, announced it would become part of OneOncology, the Nashville-based managed services organization (MSO) founded in 2018. NYOH is a physician-owned oncology practice with 60 providers, including 35 physicians, who treat patients at clinics in Albany, Amsterdam, Clifton Park, Hudson, and Troy, New York. NYOH is the 27th practice to join OneOncology, according to a statement released Tuesday.

NYOH was the first cancer care provider in its region to treat patients outside of a hospital, according to a statement from OneOncology. Today, NYOH offers radiation oncology, surgery, infusion, gynecological oncology, neurological oncology, advanced medical imaging, in-house pharmacy, subspecialty care, and lab services. The practice is also highly experienced with clinical trials and recently treated its first patient with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, according to Todd Doyle, MD, president of NYOH.

Todd Doyle, MD | Image credit: NYOH

“We’re thrilled to join other leading independent oncology practices on the OneOncology platform,” he said in advance of an interview with The American Journal of Managed Care^® (AJMC^®), when Doyle outlined the process that led NYOH to switch from its longtime MSO to OneOncology.

“The physicians at New York Oncology and Hematology are the most trusted names in cancer care in the Albany region, and we are thrilled to welcome them to the OneOncology platform,” Jeff Patton, MD, CEO, OneOncology, said in the statement. “We look forward to working with our new partners to help their practice grow, add services along the continuum of care to their clinics, and continue bringing world-class cancer care to the communities they serve.”

An edited version of an interview with Doyle follows:

AJMC: Can you discuss the process that led to this decision? What criteria were most important to you and your colleagues at New York Oncology Hematology?

Doyle: We had dozens of criteria. We worked with consultants. We spent 4 years coming to this deal, so there's been a great deal of due diligence. I am really proud of our practice and my partners, because we looked at everything. We looked at private equity. We looked at going on our own completely. We looked at other management service organizations, like the one that we're currently with, and our contract has been expiring. We looked at vertically integrated payer systems like the UnitedHealthcares of the world. We looked at pretty much everything that's out there.

Ultimately, when it came down to the decision…our folks said, “You know, there's pros and cons to each type of deal here. But what we value the most, really, is culture, and we want to align with somebody who puts the patient first.”

Ultimately, Dr Jeff Patton is the CEO of OneOncology, and he’s an oncologist. The culture at OneOncology filters down from there. Our experience with them, when they came and pitched us and from every day after that, was, “Listen, no one’s going to get everything right 100% of the time, but every decision that they're making is first saying, 'How do we get the right thing done for the patient? And from there, we'll figure out the business.'” That was the biggest criterion.

AJMC: A 4-year process—that’s a lot. It sounds like there were some specific areas where you wanted to see changes. Before we started the interview you mentioned technology. Can you describe what you mean by that?

Doyle: That was a big one on our checklist. We joke at meetings all the time, “I can go on my phone and make an appointment with my barber to get a haircut, and yet nobody can go on and switch their appointment with their oncologist online.” They have to call a human, and they end up in a phone tree, and they have a frustrating experience.

That’s just one tiny example of how in medicine, when we're supposed to be delivering cutting edge treatment, we cannot get someone scheduled for an appointment. It's insane.

Something we also really liked about OneOncology is they have partnered with a number of cutting edge technology contractors that they are working with who are bringing us sort of more state of the art experiences for the patients. This includes the electronic medical record [EMR] which was built specifically for oncology, as opposed to many EMRs that are built for general medicine or other things. The front-end software that they're interfacing with, called Phreesia, allows patients to go on ahead of time, and fill out their form so they don't have to do it when they arrive and sit in the waiting room and waste time. And they can work with the schedule to update their appointments. And afterwards, they get surveys to say, “How was your experience, what could have gone better?” There are digital touch points which didn't exist, and certainly don't exist in the practice now, which are fantastic.

There's a patient portal called Navigating Care that OneOncology went out and bought because they want to continue to develop and allow patients to have a way of reaching real time into the practice to say, “I'm having side effects, or I need advice. How do I take my medication?” And these are all things that really should be a keystroke. They don't have to be sitting on the phone for an hour waiting to get through to a human. These are the kinds of things that OneOncology is bringing to us that we're really excited about.

AJMC: To clarify for our readers, you’re speaking of the Flatiron OncoEMR…I wanted to ask about clinical trials; the announcement discusses how important research is at your practice. What about OneOncology do you feel is a good fit for your research program?

Doyle: We've been heavily involved in research for 25 years. Everything from phase 1 studies to phase 3 studies, and have been very active in that space for a very long time. This isn't new to us, but what we do like about OneOncology and the OneR research platform is, No. 1, they're growing rapidly. I think they're up to, most recently, more than 150 trials on the menu that are either open or in process, in pipeline, and those are the kind of scale that we may not get exposure to if we didn't have a national group gaining those trials. We can enroll more patients nationally than we ever could as one practice trying to get access to that trial.

Secondly, there are other places that give you a framework; there's regulatory compliance, all of those things that you need to run a very top notch research program, all that exists for you. But the one thing that we don't currently have, which we're excited about, is when we want to do smaller studies—when we want to go out and partner with a pharma company or a biotech company or a radiopharmaceutical company. We will have the ability, and we are granted access, to do those kinds of small studies on our own, individually, between NYOH and those sponsors, and that's where we sort of had handcuffs on before. We gained the best of both worlds all the scale of OneR and the ability to do smaller individual private studies with sponsors.

AJMC: Each of the major MSOs has its own mix of practices. Does OneOncology have a certain practice “type” that appealed to you? Does the size of the other practices in the MSO matter?

Doyle: What was on the screen was their growth mindset. It's not that, “Hey, we're going to go after 450 employee practices with 35 or 40 physicians.” It’s that they are looking to grow your practice and it's through the lens, again, of what is best for patients.

Let me give you the perfect example: At NYOH, we're building a brand new regional cancer center here in Albany. And what OneOncology has done is help us work through all of the planning stages, the blueprinting, all of the regulatory stuff that goes with the clean rooms for the pharmacy and all of that, as well as the financing. That's the kind of thing that doing that on your own as a mom and pop is really hard.

And we're going to build a state-of-the-art Cancer Center. It's going to open in [quarter] 1 of 2027, and we would not have realistically done that, or certainly not as well, if we didn't have a partner like OneOncology.

Now, the flip side of the coin to your question is not just is practice size something to consider, but MSO size is something to consider. What we did consider was the size of the management service organization; I think plays a lot into the culture. Currently, we exist in a very large MSO. And I've grown up in this MSO to the point where I was there when it was smaller than what OneOncology is now, and it was nimble, it was growth minded, it was patient focused. It was a lot of the things that we're doing at OneOncology now, and over time, there has been growth and then corporatization. I'm going to use that word of the way things are. It became very difficult to achieve the kinds of goals you wanted to for your patients, not purposefully, but simply because there are too many layers of bureaucracy to go through. It reminds me of the US government, and that has really been a problem. And I think also along the way, was lost that physician input about patient focus first, business focus second.

AJMC: You mentioned financing. I remember financing being a huge issue last year, when there was the Optum-Change Healthcare hack, which created so many issues for practices. At our annual meeting, Patient-Centered Oncology Care, Emily Touloukian, DO, from one of the newer practices [Coastal Cancer Center] in OneOncology discussed how OneOncology worked to backfill missing revenue—and that was a major differentiator for them. Was that experience important for you?

Doyle: Oh, I'm very hyper aware of that experience, and it was awful. We were on the platform with our current partner that went down, and we had to revert to essentially paper copies like we were in 1995. It was a disaster—it was awful for patients; it was awful for the providers—the physicians and the nurses and the therapists. Nobody was comfortable with how we were delivering care and how we were going to emerge from that. It took us months to recover from that, once the systems were brought back up. To have a partner who's willing to get in the trenches with you and help you to navigate those things, should they ever happen again, is something that also gives you a lot of comfort.

AJMC: You mentioned that your new cancer facility that you're in the process of building. What other elements of growth are you considering? What are your goals for the next 3 to 5 years?

Doyle: We’re looking at service-line expansions. We just treated our first CAR T cell patient, which is a big deal, because only really academic centers have done those, for the most part. For our first patient, everything went swimmingly. We're looking to build out CAR T cell and other bispecific and cellulose therapy service lines.

We're also looking to grow our laboratory service line to be able to offer the flow cytometry and fish FISH [fluorescence in situ hybridization] analyses, and the very complicated molecular testing that is part of oncology these days. And then, there is inorganic growth, such as looking at other partners that are in cancer or certainly cancer adjacent, Even though we're not an academic center, we should be able to [offer services] in a way that is similar, so that we have subspecialized care, including an oncologic surgeon and a specifically focused oncologist on urologic cancers or just breast cancers.

In our largest centers, we have gone to subspecialization of care, where physicians are only seeing breast cancer, or only seeing GI [gastrointestinal] malignancies and colon cancers. [We want] to try to pull in others, such as surgeons who are like minded and create centers of excellence within an outpatient setting,

AJMC: It sounds like one of your selling points might be that, in the past, someone would have to travel to New York City for these services. Will you be saying, “Hey, you don't have to go down to [Memorial] Sloan Kettering anymore. We can do it right here.” Is that part of the thinking?

Doyle: Without question.

References

1. OneOncology and New York Oncology and Hematology join forces to advance cancer care in the Albany region. News release. OneOncology. April 22, 2025. Accessed April 25, 2025. https://www.oneoncology.com/blog/oneoncology-and-new-york-oncology-hematology-join-forces-to-enhance-cancer-care-in-albany-region

2. Caffrey M. OneOncology acquires Navigating Cancer; investment will allow upgrades to patient engagement platform. AJMC. September 20, 2024. Accessed April 25, 2025.

https://www.ajmc.com/view/oneoncology-acquires-navigating-cancer-investment-will-allow-upgrades-to-patient-engagement-platform