Special Report: The Oncology Care Model, 10 Years Later
Published by
AJMC
on
Ten years after the Oncology Care Model launched, its legacy looks very different than its balance sheet. The final evaluation showed net losses to Medicare exceeding $600 million, but per-episode savings roughly quadrupled by the final performance period, and practices extended the model's care improvements to nearly all patients, not just those attributed to Medicare.
The physicians AJMC interviewed agree on what endured: a fundamental shift toward whole-person care between visits, from 24/7 triage and navigation to remote monitoring now heading toward clinical guidelines. The open question is whether CMS drew the wrong lesson from the loss headline, building a successor model that has shrunk to 28 practices while the OCM's gains were just materializing.