Devon Womack
President
By Devon Womack, president
As we wrap up 2024, I’m honored to reflect on the year that The US Oncology Network has had and the impact we’ve made in bringing the most effective and innovative cancer care to patients in their local communities.
Advancing our mission
In 2024, we welcomed Tennessee Cancer Specialists and Illinois CancerCare to The Network. By adding these practices to our organization, we are fortified by new ideas and new best practices, ensuring community care remains strong.
We also added over 60 physicians to existing practices in The Network, showing that we are delivering on our commitment of being a best place to work.
Finally, I’m thrilled we renewed our agreement with Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers. We are only as strong as the practices in our network, and this renewal solidified our combined strength.
Innovating for tomorrow
An area where we are differentiating ourselves is in innovation – we’re keeping an eye toward the future and making sure that we are well-positioned to offer the very best to patients.
Our collaboration with Sarah Cannon Research Institute is compelling – creating tremendous momentum in enrolling patients in trials that will bring new therapies to the market. We enrolled over 1,200 patients this year, and I’m excited to see this number grow in the new year.
With precision medicine at the forefront of cancer care, The Network is focused on increasing biomarker testing by alleviating the burden of test ordering, delivering molecular results directly into the EHR, and providing a variety of educational opportunities on the latest in precision medicine.
Putting patients at the center
We remain committed to delivering value to patients – and one way this is evident is through the increased use of Findhelp, the platform that assists in navigating social services, community resources, and referrals for patients. This year, practices in The Network referred more than 4,000 patients to community-based social services, showing our dedication to the whole patient beyond solely a cancer diagnosis.
We’ve also continued to demonstrate leadership in value-based care initiatives like the Enhancing Oncology Model, where we have 12 practices and over 1,500 providers participating. Practices in The Network make up almost 50% of the participants in the EOM.
Powering our network
At the core of The Network is the providers and staff in the practices each day, connecting with patients and thinking about how we can continue to bring the best care to communities. One of the greatest assets we can offer to practices in The Network is the opportunity to connect with others to share learnings and resources. Next year, I hope you’ll join us at McKesson Accelerate, where we’re building on The Network’s Annual Conference and creating a premier conference designed exclusively for community oncology practices. We hope to see you there!
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!
Marcus Neubauer, MD
Chief Medical Officer
