Dive Brief:
- Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) has partnered with healthcare company NantHealth and Allscripts, electronic health records (EHRs) vendor, to link clinical decision support with EHRs.
- The new Clinical Pathways program allows NantHealth’s eviti clinical decision support system to access clinical workflows in Allscripts’ Sunrise EHR to inform cancer treatment plans.
- Doctors can create a menu of care protocols at the point of care by integrating the latest in cancer research, treatment regimens and complementary therapies into the EHR.
Dive Insight:
The new tool could prove useful in managing utilization and costs of cancer treatments, particularly if the federal government mandates bundled payments for oncology. Oncology “involves a significant amount of care coordination throughout the treatment process, and patients could see big benefits through a bundled payment approach,” Jerrod Ullah, vice president of product management at ViiMed, told Healthcare Dive last year.
The CMS has also been pushing for more provider participation in MACRA with new alternative payment models and is offering a two-sided risk oncology care model beginning this year.
Treating cancer patients can be especially challenging because of genetic variations in some diseases and racial disparities in treatment and response rates. For example, a recent study conducted by the CDC found breast cancer rates for all women declined between 2010 and 2014, but fell faster for white women than black women.
The CTCA/NantHealth/Allscripts partnership reflects a growing trend of providers teaming up with health IT companies to advance public health. In the San Francisco Bay area, PreManage ED, a public-private partnership, is using Collective Medical Technologies’ data-sharing platform to increase care coordination for frequent emergency room users.
In a 2016 poll by Black Book Market Research, Allscripts ranked first for larger provider groups with 26 or more practitioners and independent practice groups. Providers said improvements in clinical workflow as contributing to user satisfaction. More recently, the company was one of three top-rated EHR vendors offering end-to-end solutions in population health management.