“These community practices have found it challenging to keep up with the pace of technology, innovation, drug science, economies of scale, and intelligence that is required for treating cancer patients. The idea for OneOncology came from some very smart people who saw the future and thought that they needed to be better prepared for it,” Bahl related.
“Our idea is to tap into community practices’ economies of scale and intelligence that allow them to deliver on four fundamental principles: cost, quality, access, and the patient experience,” he said.
“We will identify the things that our practices are doing that are having a meaningful impact on these four fundamental principles, leverage them across our clinical leadership, and deploy them into a common technology platform that allows us to achieve a common experience across the OneOncology footprint,” Bahl said.
OneOncology is planning to expand beyond its three founding members. It expects to add two more practices in the first quarter or early second quarter of this year. In the second half of the year, it might add two to five more practices, with further expansion planned for 2020, Bahl related.
“By bringing best practices together in one place, we think we can transform the way cancer is treated in this country,” he concluded.
OneOncology Chief Development and Marketing Officer Robin Shah told HITInfrastructure.com that his company is trying to improve oncology practice using data analytics in three areas: operationally, clinically, and financially.
OneOncology has built a customized analytics platform that combines Flatiron’s electronic health record system, practice management software that enables the practices to manage revenue cycle, and enterprise resourcing planning software, explained Shah.
In the future, OneOncology plans to add common clinical trials management software and patient safety monitoring software to the platform.
“On top of those IT solutions, we are building our own analytics platform, tentatively called OneAnalytics. It pulls out the data from each of the systems and brings it into our centralized database. We are developing algorithms and analytics to drive the key performance indicators that will help us monitor, analyze, and improve the work of our clinics,” he said.
The OneOncology platform will also monitor the flow of patients from the time they walk into the clinic, to the time they get seen by the physician, and to the time that they sit in a chemo treatment chair.
“We want to track that time so we can manage the flow of the patient in the clinic. We want to provide the best experience and make sure our clinics are staffed appropriately and have the right resources to be able to take on greater volumes of patient visits,” he said.
“A lot of the clinical and operational aspects that we are working on, as well as the tie back to the financial, are designed to participate in alternative and/or value-based agreements. The only way to do that is to understand the operations of the clinic, the cost of care for the cancer patient, as well as the outcome and quality metrics that are appropriate to drive the best care,” Shah said.
* A previous version of this story identified Flatiron as an owner and founder of OneOncology.
