Readers Write: From EHRs to EOM: Enhancing Oncology Model Highlights Limitations of Current Clinician-Facing Tech

From EHRs to EOM: Enhancing Oncology Model Highlights Limitations of Current Clinician-Facing Tech
By Kathy Dalton Ford

Kathy Dalton Ford is chief product and strategy officer at Ronin of San Mateo, CA.

For years, healthcare leaders have prioritized improving patient access and care delivery through value-based care (VBC) initiatives. However, according to a 2022 report, value-based contracts only accounted for 7% of medical revenue among primary care specialties, 6% among surgical specialties, and 15% among non-surgical specialties. These percentages indicate that despite the efforts of healthcare leaders, there is still a long way to go to implement VBC programs fully.

To address this issue, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) introduced a range of value-based care models, including the Enhancing Oncology Model (EOM). EOM, a voluntary five-year model that commenced on July 1, 2023, aims to improve the quality of care while reducing costs through payment incentives and required participant redesign activities.

Provider organizations must use certified Electronic Health Record (EHR) technology as part of the required redesign activities. EHRs are ubiquitous, with nearly four in five office-based physicians (78%) and almost all non-federal acute care hospitals (96%) adopting a certified EHR as of 2021. However, EHRs facilitate billing rather than inform care decisions, lacking the all-important ePROs and daily insights into patient conditions to inform effective cancer care. 

While EHRs support billing and reimbursement, they present several challenges for physicians in delivering timely, quality patient care, resulting from time-consuming data entry, interoperability issues, un-optimized user interface design, and lack of standardization. These problems make it challenging to access vital patient information at the point of care, increasing the time required to document patient encounters and potentially leading to errors or missed details.

Many organizations don’t have the tools to implement VBC-based programs and payment models, making EOM’s implementation governance and reimbursement support critical in realizing these life-saving initiatives. Meeting EOM requirements cannot solely be fulfilled by care teams and EHRs alone. Health systems must adopt clinical decision-support technologies that consider the patient experience outside the hospital, connect patients to their care team, and integrate safe and ethical artificial intelligence (AI) to fill the gaps in existing capabilities and realize the benefits of value-based care.

Today’s AI technology can pull data from unstructured clinician notes, accelerate time-consuming chart reviews, and improve care by analyzing data to produce actionable predictive insights. By pairing AI with a robust decision support platform and ePROs, cancer centers can provide patients with 24/7 access to care teams, streamline patient-to-care team communications, engage patients, screen for social needs, deliver health education, and identify patients at risk for adverse events.

Health systems must adopt solutions incorporating safe and ethical AI tools that accelerate precise clinical care decisions and rise above the competition to leverage EOM and capture new revenue without the burden of adding more steps to their workflows. By doing so, healthcare leaders can improve patient access and care delivery while reducing clinical and administrative burdens and realizing the full benefits of VBC programs.

Ultimately, the goal of EOM is for patients to feel better supported in their care; have a clearer understanding of their diagnosis, prognosis, and outcomes; and adhere to their treatment plan. However, the tools and data to help clinicians meaningfully facilitate their job have yet to be available.

Hospitals now have an opportunity to leverage technology to help them realize the vision of comprehensive, coordinated cancer care.