Patient-centered oncology care: impact on utilization, patient experiences, and quality

To determine whether implementation of patient-centered oncology standards in 5 medical oncology practices improved patient experiences and quality and reduced emergency department (ED) and hospital use.

Retrospective, pre-post study design with a concurrent nonrandomized control group.

We used insurance claims to calculate all-cause hospitalizations and ED visits and primary care and specialist office visits (n = 28,826 eligible patients during baseline and 30,843 during follow-up) and identify patients for a care experiences survey (n = 715 preintervention and 437 postintervention respondents). For utilization and patient experience outcomes, we compared pilot practices' performance with 18 comparison practices using difference-in-differences (DID) regression models accounting for practice-level clustering. We assessed pilot practice performance on 31 quality measures from the American Society of Clinical Oncology Quality Oncology Practice Initiative program.

There were no statistically significant differences in hospital, ED, or primary care visits between the pilot and comparison groups over time, but there was a significant increase in specialty visits for the pilot group (adjusted DID of 0.07; 95% CI, 0.01-0.13; P = .03). For care experiences, pilot practices improved more on shared decision-making (4.03 DID composite score; P = .013), whereas the comparison group improved more on access (-6.36 DID composite score; P < .001) and exchanging information (-4.25 DID composite score; P = .013). On average, pilot practices improved performance on 65% of core quality measures from baseline to follow-up.

This pilot of patient-centered oncology care showed improved quality but no impact on hospitalizations/ED use and mixed results for patient experiences. Findings are consistent with early evaluations of primary care patient-centered medical homes.