Transcript

Disclaimer: The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

Dr. Clifford Hudis: Welcome to this ASCO in Action podcast, brought to you by the ASCO Podcast Network. This is a collection of nine programs covering a wide range of educational and scientific content and offering enriching insights into the world of cancer care. You can find all of ASCO's podcasts, including this one, at podcast.asco.org.

The ASCO in Action podcast series explores policy and practice issues that impact oncologists, the entire cancer care delivery team, and most importantly, those individuals we care for-- people with cancer. My name is Clifford Hudis, and I'm the CEO of ASCO, as well as the host of the ASCO in Action podcast series.

For today's podcast, I'm delighted to have as a returning guest Dr. Jeffery Ward, past chair of ASCO's Government Relations Committee. He's here today to talk with us about ASCO's newly updated Patient-Centered Oncology Payment model, or PCOP. This is an alternative payment model which he had a major role in authoring and developing. Dr. Ward, who in many respects could be considered a Founding Father of ASCO's payment reform initiative, is going to tell us more about the significant updates in this model, its goals, and how it could work to improve care for patients with cancer. Welcome, Dr. Ward.

Dr. Jeffery Ward: Thank you. Good to be here.

Dr. Clifford Hudis: Jeff, I'm going to dive right in. I've called you a Founding Father because you played such a critical role in shaping ASCO's more than five yearlong effort to develop a viable alternative to the current pay-for-service reimbursement system. Before we get into the updated model, can you tell our listeners a little bit about how we got here today? Why are you a Founding Father?

Dr. Jeffery Ward: Well, my recollection is that it actually began about eight years ago, but it took three years to get a work product. Through an intermediary, the Brookings Institute, they asked ASCO if we had any ideas or offerings that the Congressional Budget Office could score as savings without driving oncology out of business.

At the time, I was a brand-new CPC chair, and waiting with Rocky Morton from Iowa. We pulled together-- the CPC steering committee-- about 15 doctors, mostly from community practices, and had some fairly heated meetings focused on what has proven, over time, to be a very tall peak to climb-- alternatives to buy-and-bill chemotherapy.

At the end of the day, we told the supercommittee that we had nothing for them but promised to stay engaged. That wasn't a good feeling. It wasn't a good day. And we decided that that wouldn't happen again. So, we put together a payment reform workgroup consisting of community, hospital, and academic-based oncologists, pulled in a lot of ASCO support staff, and hired a consultant-- or mediator-- to try and keep us focused. The only prerequisite to be on this group was that you had to be reform-minded, and our task was to forget everything that existed and propose a novel reimbursement model.

Dr. Clifford Hudis: Well, that brings us right to the current day and we recently put out the update of this. The official name is the ASCO Patient-Centered Oncology Payment, which is a community-based medical home model-- or PCOP for short. But at a very high level, can you tell us, what does this updated PCOP do? What makes it unique as an alternative payment model?

Dr. Jeffrey Ward: I think at a high level, it makes the oncologists responsible for being a good steward of our cancer care delivery system-- I think, arguably, the best cancer care delivery system in the world-- without making us responsible at the same time for what the market will bear-- drug prices that are both ridiculous and entirely out of our control. So, I think it aligns what we aspire to and how we get aid into one cohesive model.

Dr. Clifford Hudis: What are the specific approaches that our PCOP uses to make sure that patients have access to high-quality care, and practices have the resources they need to provide that care? And you alluded to the tension already, but I'll clarify, maybe, even more. There are those critics who will say that doctors should be focused solely on quality of care and outcomes for individual patients. And there are many others in our community who make very clear arguments for our responsibility to society to balance benefits against costs. So how do we thread that needle?

Dr. Jeffrey Ward: Well, I don't think that that's a dichotomy. I think what you have to do is, you have to say, those two goals can and should be married into a cohesive model of both delivery of care and reimbursement. PCOP actually has two reimbursement models. It has a starter track. It'll be familiar to followers of Medicare's oncology care model demo. It takes a performance-based reimbursement system and puts it on the backbone of traditional fee-for-service. But there's one big difference, in that it doesn't hold practices responsible for drug list prices.

Then there's an advanced track that's really closer to the original payment model we first published in 2014. It transitions fee-for-service oncology to monthly bundled payments and replaces the margin on drugs with a suitable pharmaceutical management fee. Critically, both tracks then marry the reimbursement model with an oncology medical home model of care and value-based clinical pathways in an effort to hold us responsible for care management and appropriate utilization of oncologics that, I believe, broadly applied, would put downward pressure on pharmaceutical drug prices without putting practices in the middle anymore.

Dr. Clifford Hudis: I want to drill down a little bit on this oncology medical home framework. What would it actually take for a practice to engage in this, and how would a patient perceive benefit?

Dr. Jeffrey Ward: For a practice to be able to say, "we're going to do this", they would start, probably, with the simpler track and work their way up. In the advanced track, the PCOP payment methodology actually involves three components. There are monthly payments, there is residual fee-for-service reimbursement, and then there's performance incentive payments. Practices are held accountable for providing high value, evidence-based care under three different performance categories. These three scores of equal weight then contribute to a score that, done well, improves your reimbursement. Done poorly, it lowers your reimbursement. And though it's contrary to business as usual, I think it's hard to argue that it shouldn't, particularly when you as a practice had a role in creating the parameters themselves.

Dr. Clifford Hudis: What happens-- just for people who might either be interested in this, but haven't participated, or for people that are approaching this slightly more academically, you're going about your business and you're in a practice. What triggers you to start doing this? Another is, why don't you just put your head down and keep doing things the way you have?

Dr. Jeffrey Ward: I think for several reasons. One reason is that we have a system that isn't going to be able to continue the way it is. There's no doubt that prices are accelerating in such a way that, if we don't find a way to bend the cost curve, we're not going to be able to fulfill the mission we have to take care of patients.

The second reason is that this is a pathway that actually is going to improve the way we give care. The struggle we have with fee-for-service medicine in general is that it rewards the provider for doing more. This effect is amplified dramatically when you apply it to the cost of drugs. On the other hand, value-based pathways-- what we've built into this-- that look at efficacy first, toxicity second, and cost as a tiebreaker, can reward me for using the right drug in the right patient at the right time. And a well-constructed pathway will avoid both over and under-utilization of therapies. And that helps make PCOP, I think, uniquely different from payer-mandated pathways because it's a prospective pathway agreed upon by the providers and t