Blog

By Marcus Neubauer, MD, Chief Medical Officer

The Network was thrilled to host another installment of our Annual Conference last month in Indianapolis. It’s always hard to top the previous year, but we just may have on the heels of tremendous growth of The Network and the excitement for what we are accomplishing together.

The Annual Conference is our signature event, and we were honored to host leaders from practices in The Network as we came together to hear insights on trends in oncology and network with our peers. I feel more energized than ever after the conclusion of the event and know that many who attended feel the same way. The power of The Network was palpable!

Here are a few of my takeaways from this year’s Annual Conference:

The tenacity and ingenuity of practices in The Network is remarkable

The theme of this year’s conference was “the power of community in action” – and I heard countless examples of how practices in The Network are living this every day. When a challenge is identified with the patient experience or clinic workflows, we work together to develop innovative and enduring solutions.

A great example was one that Jason Hammonds shared in his opening session: an initiative at Texas Oncology to redefine how the practice engages with new and existing patients. It is called “Project Touchpoint” and it is a first-of-its-kind, customized platform that uses AI-generated phone triage to capture incoming calls and solve for the issue on the first call. This has shown to significantly reduce unanswered calls.

Across The Network, the patient experience is at the core of innovation and Devon Womack spoke in her session about the investments we are making in this area. Devon reported on a Network-wide initiative to reduce the time to schedule new cancer patients.

We are making tremendous strides in advancing therapies for patients through research

We recently marked the first full year of our joint venture with Sarah Cannon Research Institute (SCRI), a partnership that is elevating clinical cancer research and advancing therapies available for patients. At the Annual Conference, we heard through a panel presentation that more trials are now available to practices in The Network and time to open a trial is much faster with SCRI.  This leads to more clinical trial opportunities for patients.

In addition, Genospace is helping practices in The Network solve one of the most complex challenges in research – identifying eligible patients. Among Genospace’s many functions is the ability to connect biomarker test results with each practice’s clinical data from their electronic health record. This provides advanced clinical trial matching and we’re already seeing practices realize the results of leveraging this technology. We will continue to see more synergies with SCRI and more benefits to the patient as time progresses.

Our focus on precision medicine is ensuring patients receive the most effective treatment possible

In The Network, we’ve been developing a cutting-edge precision medicine program that supports practices in ordering biomarker tests and the use of targeted therapies. Trends presented at the Annual Conference show that this program is taking off.

The team has focused their efforts in three areas: education, workflow and technology. Spanning these areas is the implementation of a genomic ordering module within iKnowMed℠, our oncology electronic health record, to provide practices with National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) testing alerts at the time of diagnosis and staging. The team is also utilizing Genospace for automated biomarker result integration and is continuing to build out the shared capabilities between our organizations. This work is ensuring more patients are receiving the most effective treatments.

While I’ve shared three takeaways here, we discussed a number of other topics at the Annual Conference, including value-based care, public policy, best practices and more. The expertise and the passion in The Network is unmatched and it’s wonderful to be reminded of our collective power when we come together!