Supporting the Employee Journey Through Cancer: Carrum Health and AccessHope’s Partnership
In October 2022, HMP Global and the Cancer Business Forum announced a collaborative venture called the Cancer Care Business Exchange (CCBEx). This is a high-level, multistakeholder forum focusing on the business implications of the changing complexities in cancer care delivery and payment through conversations between those who have interest, influence, and impact in the field. Toward this goal, CCBEx has begun a video series, Cancer Care Business Breakthroughs, that aims to highlight topics of relevance and recent developments in the cancer care delivery space. The first topic area in this series, The Sleeping Giant: Cost of Cancer Care Rousing Self-Insured Employers, focuses on partnerships and discussions around what employers are doing to try and mitigate the costs of cancer care for employees.
In the first episode, Erich Mounce, MHA, Oncology Care Partners, spoke with Dr Deirdre Saulet, Carrum Health, and Dr Harlan Levine, AccessHope, (Figure) to discuss the recently announced partnership between Carrum Health and AccessHope. This collaboration aims to help self-insured employers support their employees throughout the cancer journey, ensuring each patient has access to the right care at the right time.
Below is an excerpt from the video, edited for clarity and brevity.
Erich Mounce, MHA: Why did AccessHope partner with Carrum? What is the vision for this partnership?
Harlan Levine, MD: It really is a cool concept, which is the industry is so used to offering one-size-fits-all products to the members, or to employers. And, you know, cancer is so many different diseases now, and each one really defined by its DNA, and patients just quite simply have different needs. Some need surgery, some need standard care, some need access to leading-edge information. Others need to have special procedures or a multidisciplinary approach that you might not be able to get in a community, and others need to be on a clinical trial.
So, the driver here was cancer care is different, and there’s a greater need for personalization in cancer than there is in other conditions. This partnership puts the patient or the member in the middle, it identifies what the need is, and if someone needs to go to a specialized Center of Excellence for a procedure or a treatment, they have that. But if they either don’t have that need or can’t travel for some reason, they can get virtual support from AccessHope and, by way of AccessHope, all the National Cancer Institute experts in our network.
Mounce: So with that, Deirdre, where do you see Carrum? I’m sure that they’re looking at this vision similarly. But from an employer perspective, how do they look at this partnership?
Deirdre Saulet, PhD: As you could sort of piece apart from Harlan’s points, when we think about this from the employer perspective, one of the things we consistently hear from them is that they are concerned about integrating the different benefit solutions that they have access to and making that really seamless for their employees to get to the right solution at the right time.
So really, we want to help simplify and address that as much as we can. This partnership allows employers who are on our platform to turn on AccessHope through Carrum. This means on our end that we can provide a much more seamless experience for employees and their family members when they’re facing a cancer diagnosis, so they can come to Carrum, and then we can help them get where they need to go. For instance, some patients might be eligible for a treatment bundle where they can get their surgery, chemo, radiation at a specific center of excellence, while anyone facing a diagnosis of cancer will be able to benefit from AccessHope. Right there they can go and get that expert review of their diagnosis and their treatment plan and have ongoing support across their journey.
So, to sum it up, our overarching vision is that this is going to help simplify the experience for employers and for their employees and dependents. When we talk to employers about what they’re looking for in a cancer solution specifically, their top priority is member experience. You know, they ask us, how can we help make a diagnosis of cancer as easy to deal with as humanly possible for their families, for their employees, and that really is what this partnership is going to help us accomplish.
Watch the full video here.
