Integrated, multidisciplinary cancer management is crucial for value-based medicine

On June 20, 2024, Michael A. Choti, MD, MBA, Banner MD Anderson, chaired the second annual Advancing Value-Based Oncology Care meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. In an interview with The American Journal of Managed Care^®Choti discussed the goals of this year’s event as well as some of the key challenges and considerations of value-based cancer care.

This transcript has been lightly edited

Transcript

How would you characterize the goals or key takeaways from this second annual Advancing Value-Based Oncology Care event?

Oncology is challenging. It’s expensive and it requires integration. I think one message we learned here is the importance of complexity (value-based care), integrated management of cancer care and cost control. So this meeting really showed how others are doing it. At Banner MD Anderson, we are an organization that is clearly moving in that direction. We showed the direction we are going in this area and I think it was a very exciting symposium again this year.

In your opinion, what are the most important components that must be in place for the successful implementation of value-based oncology care?

The critical components of moving to value-based care, as you’ve heard at this conference, are creating integrated, multidisciplinary cancer care, informatics, and good analytics to truly understand costs, utilization, and best practices, and ways to eliminate disparities and care for all.

How can health systems reconcile the costs of innovative cancer treatments with the principles of value-based care?

I think one of the challenges in cancer care is balancing the cost of cancer care with the principles of value-based medicine. That’s a challenge. How can we address that and what are the opportunities? I think one of them is to leverage technology: predictive analytics, information technology. Artificial intelligence, I think that’s going to be an area that will support the evolution toward high-quality cancer care within a value-based care framework.