Dr. Dinesh Kapur Discusses the Role of OneCouncil in Driving Excellence in Cancer Care

OneCouncil is a physician-led board that plays an integral role in supporting OneOncology’s clinical and strategic initiatives. In the interview below, Dr. Kapur explains the role that OneCouncil plays and how this committee benefits oncology practices, patients, and cancer care throughout the country.

What is OneOncology?

OneOncology is a network of the nation’s leading oncology practices bringing the latest cancer research and treatment options to patients, close to home. The goal of OneOncology is to empower physician practices and physician leadership to implement cutting edge, efficient, value-based care in their practices while, at the same time, providing excellent quality metrics, research portfolios, and such. One other way that OneOncology distinguishes itself from others is the amount of data analytics that we are doing. And, through our data analytics and our data analytics partners, we are able to home in on very minute details, extremely efficiently and quickly.

What is OneCouncil?

OneCouncil is the physician, or clinical, arm of OneOncology. OneCouncil has participation from each group’s physician leadership. We provide business ideas as to what is needed for delivering cutting edge cancer care to patients across the nation in their local communities. We come up with the ideas, the plan, and the direction we want OneOncology to take, and then we pass this along to OneOncology to start implementing and delivering on these strategic priorities.

How does OneCouncil give physicians a voice?

OneCouncil is where our physician leadership, decision-making, and collaboration flourish. We meet every two months and we have representatives from all the practices at the table, so that we are able to have the entire physician leadership and decision makers who come together to collaborate and brainstorm ideas as to the direction OneOncology should take in the future.

OneOncology is really a physician-run and -led organization. Physicians are in charge of guiding and steering the organization in the direction of what we want to achieve in the delivery of cancer care for our patients throughout the country.

This includes research, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. All of these collaborations come through OneCouncil.

Where is the field of oncology heading?

Lots of data analytics and artificial intelligence are coming on board at a very interesting time for oncology delivery in this country and around the world. My goal is to make OneOncology as cutting edge as possible through our OneCouncil leadership and also to bring artificial intelligence, more research, and data analytics to improve patient care and also discuss value-based care with payers, employers, and have collaborations with them as well.

How does the work of OneCouncil benefit the oncology community?

Oncologists should care about OneCouncil’s work because we are meeting together in coming up with what is really a roadmap for how we envision the future of oncology. And we may be taking some detours along the way, and some projects that we do might not flourish as well as we think they would, but at the same time, because the field is so dynamic, oncologists should care about the work of OneCouncil. Because this is where we will be able to bring:

• cutting edge technology
• cutting edge research
• molecular diagnostics
• molecular testing
• genomics
• personalized care to patients, very quickly

What is the role of value-based care?

Value-based care is a form of reimbursement that ties payments for care delivery to the quality of care provided and rewards providers for both efficiency and effectiveness. 

As oncologists and oncology practices throughout the country, we need to understand and realize that value-based care is here to stay. In order for us to be very competitive in the oncology landscape, we need to embrace value-based care. But, in order to do that, we need to implement all the tools in our practices. Through OneCouncil we are able to empower the practices to have all the tools they need to implement. The old fee for service models are evolving and anybody who is living in that world needs to understand that employers, payers, and big organizations are looking towards value-based care.

We need to be able to provide cutting edge care in our practices, but we also need to be able to justify the quality and the efficiency of care that we are providing. So through OneCouncil, we are able to come up with tools that we can implement in our practices, which really show the benefits of value-based care, including artificial intelligence, data analytics, and data monitoring, to show how our practices are doing compared to other practices in the country, other organizations in the country, and amongst ourselves.

How does the work of OneCouncil benefit oncology patients?

Our patients benefit in numerous ways from OneOncology’s model and platform because you have thought leaders across the country who are getting together when they are on OneCouncil. They are directing cancer care for the patients, which includes improving access to clinical trials and collaborating with big pharmaceutical companies and big molecular diagnostic companies in getting cutting edge clinical trials to patients in their own communities. This is something that for many years was only available at big research institutions. I can tell you that a practice like ours, which is a smaller practice, is able to offer these cutting edge clinical trials to our patients in our own community. And this research portfolio keeps on increasing and expanding.

Watch a Helpful Video

Click below to watch Dr. Kapur discuss more about the importance or OneOncology and the role of OneCouncil. 

To learn more about OneOncology, visit: www.oneoncology.com.