Value-Based Care Calls for Putting Novel Therapies Closer to Patients
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The last time The American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC) hosted a meeting in Princeton, New Jersey, was 2014, as millions of Americans were gaining health coverage under the Affordable Care Act—some for the first time in their lives.
Across health care, people were trying to grasp a new concept called value-based care, which focused on delivering just the right amount of treatment and making sure patients were screened for conditions such as cancer or diabetes before they became unmanageable.1 The idea of measuring doctors or hospitals on whether patients had a good experience was coming—and for some, that was scary.2
More than a decade later, as AJMC’s Institute for Value-Based Medicine® met on May 8, 2025, in Princeton, New Jersey, the fruits of value-based care are everywhere. But it’s still a term that’s hard to define, said Ed Licitra, MD, PhD, an oncologist-hematologist at and CEO of Astera Cancer Care, which has 100 providers across New Jersey.
“My journey in value-based care started about 10 years ago, when we started thinking a lot about value-based care before it was even defined,” Licitra said. “I can’t even tell you that today that it’s truly been defined. If you ask 100 people, ‘What is value-based care in oncology?’ you might get a lot of different answers.”
For Licitra, value-based care means providing access to care, driving the best clinical outcomes, and driving affordability in the health system. He focused on those priorities to moderate the opening discussion, “Measuring What Matters: Defining Value and Ensuring Affordable Access in Modern Oncology.”
Joining Licitra were:
- Coral Omene, MD, PhD, medical oncologist and program director of Breast Cancer Disparities Research at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ) associate professor of medicine at Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Medical School at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick;
- Benjamin Roman, MD, MBA, MSHP, a head and neck surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center in New York, New York; and
- Shannon Woerner, MBA, AOCNP, ANP-BC, vice president of clinical operations at Astera Cancer Care.
Ensuring access, good outcomes, and affordability are all related, said Licitra, who asked, “How do we actually create models of care, or how do we create ways of caring for [patients with cancer] that creates better affordability for care?”