A New Payment Model With a Focus on Patient Centered Care

Last summer, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services unveiled a performance-based Oncology Care Model (OCM) and selected 190 practices across the country to participate in the ambitious 5-year pilot, which, if successful, could become a model for the delivery of cancer care in the future.

What does this innovative payment model portend for the oncology nurse? As the OCM pilot moves into its second year, Oncology Nursing News spoke with nurses who work at some of these OCM participating practices.

They see many benefits of the mod- el and agree that care coordination, facilitated by a navigator, stands at its core. In fact, communication and collaboration is 1 of the 4 major domains of the OCM, along with a focus on the patient and caregiver experience, clinical quality of care, and patient safety. These, of course, are principles oncology nursing professionals already embrace in the clinic every day.

A focus on patient safety underpins this month’s Fast Facts for the Frontline on preventing falls. As clinical nurse specialist Melissa Grier reminds us, an otherwise successful patient experience can be upended when a patient falls, and consciously working to prevent such events is the business of everyone on the inpatient floor.

May is Oncology Nursing Month, and again this year, we showcase an outstanding oncology nurse. As always, there are so many to choose from! In this issue, we spotlight Seattle Cancer Care Alliance’s Rosemary Ford, recently retired after 4 decades, most spent in oncology nursing. Ford worked alongside Nobel Prize—winning Donnell Thomas, MD, a trailblazer in the development of bone marrow transplant to treat blood cancers. Thomas described nurses as his “secret weapon,” and who could disagree with that?

Nurses may sometimes wonder when explaining anticancer therapies to patients and their caregivers, do they actually understand the instructions? Clinicians at the Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven took on this challenge and developed a competency assessment using live simulations of these interactions; the results are impressive.

Our editors were on hand to cover the 42nd Annual Oncology Nursing Society Congress held May 4-7 in Denver. We’ll have full coverage in our June issue and online at OncNursingNews.com.

In the meantime, and as always, thank you for reading.

—Mike HennessyChairman and CEO