Patient care time has been displaced by time spent on the telephone and writing letters to justify their treatment plans or to respond to cost management. The for-profit insurance corporations, controlling large populations of patients, currently micromanage the physician's practices. The physician in this system no longer has unilateral ability to make judgments regarding the care of his or her patients. The oncology physician network is one of several alternative cancer care paradigms that is gaining support. This network is capable of managing cancer care in a shared-risk arrangement with the payer.
Cancer is an easily definable disease that affects a relatively large segment of the population.
It is predicted to become the No. 1 cause of death in the United States by the year 2000. The services required to care for a patient with cancer are identifiable and relatively predictable based on the disease site and stage. Many insurers see advantages in sharing or passing on the financial risk of caring for cancer patients to the provider as a means of predicting and controlling their costs. Physician provider networks that are willing to share risk with the insurers provide an opportunity to return the control of patient care to the physician and to restore quality to the managed care equation. In this model, the physician group typically contracts to provide specified oncology services for a fixed payment and assumes the responsibility of providing care according to its own clinical guidelines and quality standards.