, according to a report from a large, independent, community-based oncology practice.
The program saved nearly $3.2 million in Medicare costs over the course of the year, said Molly Mendenhall, RN, of Oncology Hematology Care in Cincinnati.
“By keeping those patients out of the hospital, we were able to improve patient quality of life, and increase patient satisfaction by treating them in their home clinic instead of the hospital,” Ms. Mendenhall said at a symposium on quality care sponsored by the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
The campaign was developed in anticipation of participating in the Oncology Care Model (OCM), a program focused on providing coordinated and high-quality care for Medicare oncology patients at the same or lower cost.
Prior to participating in OCM, Ms. Mendenhall and her colleagues set up an after-hours phone triage system, proactive chemotherapy follow-up calls, and a Saturday-Sunday urgent care clinic designed to help avoid any unnecessary hospitalizations over the weekend.
They also set up a 2-hour structured OCM treatment planning visit to prioritize shared decision making between the patient and the clinical team regarding diagnosis, symptom management, financial assistance, and other aspects of care.
The most influential part of the initiative, according to Ms. Mendenhall, was a patient-directed “Call Us Early – Call Us First” campaign that included symptom management teaching sheets, a 34-page teaching book, and branded buttons, pens, and magnets all designed to emphasize the patient responsibility to use the phone.
“All of those previous steps really wouldn’t make a difference if the patients still weren’t calling us,” Ms. Mendenhall explained.
Over the first year of participation in the OCM program, the oncology practice saw a 16% statistically significant reduction in hospital admissions (P = .005). The number of inpatient admissions per 100 patients dropped from 26.8 at baseline to 22.6 at the most recent follow-up in a report published simultaneously in the Journal of Oncology Practice.
Reduced admissions translated into a drop of $798,000 in inpatient costs per quarter over 1,600 patients, or $3.129 million in savings for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services over the first year of participation in OCM, according to the researchers.
Patient satisfaction scores trended positively over the course of that year based on a review of blinded surveys that asked patients to rate clinical care, communication, access, information exchange, and other aspects of their experience.
Scores on those surveys were 8.03 on a scale of 0-10 (low to high) during the baseline period of January to September 2016, the researchers said. Scores were 8.29 and 8.26 for two follow-up surveys.
Ms. Mendenhall had no disclosures to report. Coauthors on the study provided disclosures related to Janssen Oncology, Pfizer, Amgen, Abbvie, Merck, Pharmacyclics, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Celgene, Genentech/Roche, AZTherapies, and Lilly. Two coauthors reported leadership, stock, or other ownership interests in Oncology Hematology Care/US Oncology.
SOURCE: Mendenhall M et al. Quality Care Symposium, Abstract 30.