Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Design and Evaluation of CMMI’s First Specialty Physician V B P Model: The Oncology Care Model

(Health Policy)

The Oncology Care Model (OCM) is CMMI’s first physician specialty value-based purchasing (VBP) model.  It is a voluntary model in which oncology physician group practices are incentivized to improve access, coordinate care, and improve quality and patient care experiences, while maintaining or lowering costs to Medicare. In this session, the CMMI-contracted evaluation team will share an overview of the model and the difference-in-differences (DID) evaluation approach, as well as innovative research methodologies designed for the OCM evaluation that may have more general relevance for oncology research and evaluating quality of care delivered by physician practices. The four presenters will discuss the following evaluation research topics:

• Use of propensity score matching to select a comparison group for the DID evaluation;
• Underlying characteristics of the intervention and comparison groups in the baseline period, representativeness of the practices that chose to participate, and baseline trends in important outcomes for the two groups (to validate the parallel trends assumption underlying the DID evaluation approach);
• Comparison of innovative clinically-derived algorithms and machine learning methods to predict/derive cancer disease stage using claims data; and
• Innovative patient survey methods to enhance response rates and measure care experiences of cancer patients served by participating OCM physician practices, including both patients who survive and those who do not.