Integrating Palliative Care Into the Oncology Care Model via Clinical Pathways

In a recent article, UW Internal Medicine resident Dr. Nikita Vashi and VSSL Director Dr. Joshua Liao discussed ways to use clinical pathways to integrate palliative care into bundled payments in the Oncology Care Model.

As Drs. Vashi and Liao write, "Participants in the Oncology Care Model (OCM) have both the opportunity and need to drive performance by building upon strong historical foundations in oncology clinical pathways and by promoting outcomes for patients receiving chemotherapy. While a number of payment model modifications would be beneficial, such as those articulated through OCM 2.0, one involves integrating palliative care within OCM using clinical pathways. Several strategies can help participants achieve this goal, such as embedding automatically-triggering early palliative care consults, permitting parallel and potentially intersecting curative chemotherapy and palliative processes, and promoting education via patient-facing pathway materials."