Robin Shah Outlines the Biggest Challenges Facing Community Oncologists

The changing payment and competition landscape in healthcare are the 2 biggest challenges facing community oncologists today, explained Robin Shah, vice president of Provider Marketing and Strategy at Flatiron Health.

Transcript

What are the biggest challenges facing community oncologists that Flatiron Health is trying to help with?

So I would say 2 of the biggest challenges community oncologists face today are there’s a changing landscape from a payer perspective. So, right now, practices get paid 1 way and they’ve built their businesses to get paid in that way and these businesses are large and there’s a shift in payment for these massive business that they don’t have the support system, infrastructure and technology to help them operate in that new era of payment. So, the shift has been tectonic, where it’ll sort of buzz and then come back because the practices can’t handle it, and so, it’s sort of that point of which one of the practices are going to be able to make it through when the real shift does come. A real shift hasn’t come yet, it’s sort of been piecemeal, but we do think that it’ll come sooner than later and the smaller practices won’t be able to survive in this new market because they won’t have the infrastructure to operate. So that’s number one.

Number two is competition. As you have this shift, those that can handle that type of change, become bigger stronger better and those that can’t will continue to falter. As the larger groups, the ones that actually have the infrastructure are successful, they then become an engine to compete against the other groups. Right now, the systems that are capable of doing this are hospitals, specifically because the government has built a number of incentive programs for the hospitals to be sustainable. So, that is a complicated and difficult arena for community oncology providers unless there’s a shift in that government regulation that favors hospitals. That may or may not happen. Right now a lot of it is focused on payment, but how does an organization actually build the infrastructure around the new business models that are being created?