Texas Oncology, one of the nation’s largest community-based oncology practices, encompassing nearly 1,000 providers across 280 locations in Texas, has announced a multi-year partnership with continuous care platform company Canopy, after piloting the solution in its Amarillo Cancer Center.
Canopy provides oncology practices with a platform for all the care that happens between visits. Canopy’s multi-channel ePRO (electronic patient-reported outcomes) and remote triage system enables practices to identify and prioritize patients who need help, and resolve their issues. The company also helps oncology practices generate new reimbursement streams from programs like the Enhancing Oncology Model (EOM), and Remote Therapeutic Monitoring (RTM).
Canopy’s tools, which include remote monitoring, decision support, and reimbursement capture, have been integrated with EHR systems from Flatiron Health and iKnowMed, Ontada’s EHR and part of McKesson’s suite of oncology solutions.
The company aims to expand its AI capabilities to enhance patient care and support the adoption of new, complex cancer therapies.
In an e-mail Q&A, Debra Patt, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., executive vice president of public policy and strategy for Texas Oncology, explained why the partnership with Canopy was appealing.
“First, we know by responding to patient symptoms earlier that we are taking better care of them. They will be less impacted by their cancer and cancer treatment. They will be less likely to go to the ER or hospital and have a better outcome,” Patt said. “Our partnership with Canopy serves this goal as it creates an operational framework for faster symptom response time. Second, we want our staff to work at top of license, and the partnership allows our nurses to be nurses more of the time by decreasing the administrative documentation burdens of their job through the innovative use of AI and decision support.”
Patt noted that during the Amarillo clinic pilot, they saw high adoption rates. “This means the symptom management tools have a better opportunity to serve patients,” she said.
Patt was asked if Canopy will help Texas Oncology’s performance in the Enhancing Oncology Model. “Absolutely,” she responded. “But we aren’t limiting it to this small population of patients as we believe all patients can benefit from this technology. At Texas Oncology it is our mission to deliver the highest quality of cancer care close to home and we will continue to make investments in alignment with that mission.”
“We’re helping oncology practices through software and tooling and reimbursement and expertise to make the cancer care continuous, as opposed to just episodic,” explained Lavi Kwiatkowsky, CEO and founder of Canopy in an interview with Healthcare Innovation. It is helping them change their approach from reactive to proactive, he added.
Kwiatkowsky explained that Canopy has been working relatively quietly and under the radar on this problem since 2018. “We started by building remote monitoring. We learned it doesn’t matter how much you monitor if the practice is not set up to respond to all these problems,” he said. “So we build decision support for nurses to help them triage what is an emergency and what isn’t, what needs to be done. We built algorithms to separate the urgent from the non-urgent. We’ve built ways to capture reimbursement for it with chronic care, and we’ve advocated for reimbursement with Medicare for many years now, and we now have remote therapeutic monitoring codes.”
Kwiatkowsky said he would describe the past six years as coming to the realization that monitoring is not enough. To make the patient successful, you have to make the practice successful, he said. “So we’ve been building tools for the practices for six years now. We are their CRM, so for everyone who calls into the office, a ticket is captured in Canopy. We are their triage algorithms. We are the remote monitoring system. We are their decision support system. And we capture reimbursement for the work.”
He said that with the partnership with Texas Oncology, Canopy is announcing a few things. One is that they are now serving 10% of the U.S. market. “We’re taking this thing that was shown to increase survival or improve outcomes and now we’re spreading it across the U.S., Kwiatkowsky added. “We’re lowering the barriers for them to adopt it and we’re even making it profitable for them to adopt it. We have cancer centers working with us who make $10 million or more from reimbursements associated with this work of supporting their patients. Now the reason the payers are paying for it is because it’s been shown to save far more money.”
He said they are seeing about 75% coverage in insurance — that means all of Medicare, Medicare Advantage, and about half of the commercial payers.
All the practices in EOM and other leading practices in community oncology already have teams of nurses that tackle patients issues between visits. They’re called triage nurses in oncology. “What we do is empower those teams with dedicated workflow solutions that they did not have,” Kwiatkowsky said.
There is some change management involved in doing the implementation, he said, but the practices find it is worth it. “Texas Oncology was doing some of these things previously; we just gave them a better system that has them doing less work.”
