Moving physician dispensing standards forward: Highlights from NCODA’s Fall Summit

At NCODA’s annual spring and fall summits, their commitment to improving operations in medically integrated dispensing practices and their “passion for patients” takes center stage. At their most recent Fall Summit, held October 24-26 in Orlando, FL, dispensing standards and positive quality interventions were two key topics for discussion. The VitalSource™ GPO team was in attendance and shared this summary of the main takeaways. 

NCODA recently announced a collaboration with the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) to develop oral oncology dispensing standards that will enhance ASCO’s Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI) Certification Program. Stephen Grubbs, MD, FASCO, VP of Clinical Affairs for ASCO, explained the details of this effort in his keynote address.

The QOPI quality program seeks to foster a culture of self-improvement for practices and offers more than 150 evidence-based quality measures for evaluation. Participating practices receive both individual performance scores and benchmarked scores aggregated from all participants, which identify areas of improvement and offer guidance on developing and implementing initiatives to improve outcomes and deliver better patient care.

While separate from ACHC or URAC accreditation, QOPI certification is another significant proof point for practices to demonstrate the quality of care they provide, and the work applied toward this certification can be applied to several other valuable programs. QOPI-certified practices may qualify for Improvement Activity points that count toward Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) reporting. It can also help practices gain more leverage with payers and be used to help obtain Joint Commission accreditation for hospital-based practices or a “Center of Excellence” designation from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN).

Currently, QOPI standards are somewhat labor intensive. In partnering together, ASCO and NCODA will work with a multidisciplinary committee to determine which standards are necessary and home in on the standards that truly demonstrate quality. Additionally, medically-integrated dispensing will be added on to the current QOPI certification, and standards for patient education and adherence will be expanded. A formal launch of the updated QOPI standards is slated for the next ASCO Annual Meeting in June 2020.

Oral drug therapy is a continually evolving area of cancer care. As practices and care teams move from administering IVs to tracking a patient’s adherence, they are encountering new challenges and complexities. NCODA’s Positive Quality Intervention (PQI) program provides quality standards and best treatment practices around a specific aspect of cancer care to help equip a multidisciplinary team with easily understandable resources for managing patients receiving oral drug therapy. PQIs are designed to help operationalize and standardize oral cancer care, creating a meaningful opportunity for knowledge sharing among peers.

NCODA’s PQI in Action series incorporates opinions and experiences from a variety of oncology experts serving on medically integrated dispensing teams at leading oncology organizations and summarizes their treatment pathways in peer-reviewed clinical guidance documents on a specific area of cancer care.

Several examples were shared at the “Putting Positive Quality Interventions into Action” panel. In the discussion, Austin Cox, PharmD, Clinical Pharmacist at Alabama Oncology, shared how the automated pharmacy care plan developed by his VitalSource™ GPO practice consultant was an essential tool in his practice’s process for managing and monitoring metastatic colorectal cancer patients.

Through these and other efforts to strengthen oncology organizations and medically integrated dispensing programs, NCODA serves as a champion for keeping a patient’s treatment within the oncology practice to enable the best care coordination and outcomes. VitalSource™ GPO is proud to support NCODA’s work as a part of our mission to help future-proof oncology practices by navigating change and identifying opportunities to further their success.

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