Specialty care company Lantern revealed it will expand its cancer care navigation platform through a new partnership with AccessHope.
Through the partnership, Lantern’s platform will now include expert review at each point in a patient’s care journey, preventing misdiagnoses and ensuring treatments meet clinical guidelines. Reviews will be conducted by experts at National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated cancer centers, according to the announcement.
Lantern said the reviews will be available for both adult and pediatric cancers as well as solid tumors and blood-based disease.
Dickon Waterfield, president of Lantern, told Fierce Healthcare that the “beauty of this partnership” lies in the ability to allow people to seek care in their local communities while also providing them supports at the standard of an NCI-designated facility.
AccessHope, a cancer care benefits company, makes it easier for clinical teams to conduct those reviews at key times for the members’ care journey, such as a reoccurrence after a remission, which requires a different approach than treating a new cancer diagnosis, he said.
“The power of what AccessHope can do is to get us that NCI-level subspecialty to support all those members at these different points in the journey, all initiated by our oncology care team to support that member,” Waterfield said.
In addition to the regular reviews to ensure the patient is receiving appropriate treatment, the platform also allows for clinical trial matching and support in navigating that experience. Clinical trials can be valuable options for many patients, though participation is relatively low today.
Yousuf Zafar, M.D., chief medical officer for AccessHope, told Fierce Healthcare that enabling a variety of treatment options within that clinical framework is crucial, as the same type of cancer can present very differently between patients.
“Cancer care doesn’t happen in a snapshot,” Zafar said. “It’s something that evolves month to month, sometimes week to week.”
Lantern’s platform is also designed to connect patients with infusion centers closer to home through a national network, increasing access as well as mitigating costs related to infusion care provided in a hospital or outpatient center.
The cost of managing cancer care is top of mind for employers, too, which is why the Lantern team believes there’s opportunity to innovate in this space. Scott Kirschner, senior director of global benefits at Greystar, a property management firm that employs 27,000 people across 47 states, told Fierce that cancer represents the second-highest cost diagnostic category for the company.
That makes the need for effective, high-value care management services clear, he said.
“It all comes together if we can have better, more efficient, more human, more cost effective—probably with better outcomes—treatment,” he said.
Kirschner added that having a partner like Lantern allows the benefits team to more readily triage concerns from workers, such as the executive who encountered a “mistletoe treatment” for cancer on a Google search and did not understand why it was considered experimental by their health insurer.
Waterfield said bringing AccessHope into the fold also provides valuable support for the oncology team, which is beyond the scope of the Lantern team’s focus.
“We’re so focused on the member, and being able to pair those two things together suddenly brings it sort of full circle to drive greater outcomes and also make sure that the member has got a full understanding of the impact and the support that is being delivered for them,” he said.
