Advanced Practice Providers - APPs in Oncology

Advanced practice providers (APPs) are a key component to effective team-based care, but what is it that our APP team-members can do in an oncology practice? Join the Co-hosts of the APP podcast series, Todd Pickard (MD Anderson Cancer Center) and Stephanie Williams (Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine), along with guests Wendy Vogel (BroadcastMed/APSHO)) and Tammy Triglianos (University of North Carolina Basnight Cancer Hospital), as they highlight the services and examples of what APPs in oncology can do, their role as an APP in team-based care, if and how they bill for their services, and how they are reimbursed.
Speaker Disclosures: Stephanie Williams: Consultant or Advisory Role – CVS Caremark Tammy Triglianos: Consulting or Advisory Role – Pfizer Todd Pickard: No relationships to disclose Wendy Vogel: No relationships to disclose
Resources: Podcast: Advanced Practice Providers - APPs 101: What and Who Are Advanced Practice Providers (APPs)? Podcast: Advanced Practice Providers – An APP's Scope of Practice Advanced Practice Providers - APPs 101: Physicians Assistants (PAs) and Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNS) in Oncology
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TRANSCRIPT
The disclosures for guests on this podcast can be found in the show notes.
Dr. Stephanie Williams: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the ASCO Education podcast, and our fourth episode of the Advanced Practice Providers series. I'm Dr. Stephanie Williams, a medical oncologist, and your co-host for the series, along with physician assistant Todd Pickard. We'd also like to introduce you to our guest panelists today. Returning guest, Wendy Vogel, along with Tammy Triglianos. We'll take a moment to let them introduce themselves, starting with Wendy.
Wendy Vogel: Hi. Thanks so much for having me today. I'm Wendy Vogel. I'm an oncology nurse practitioner by trade, and I am the Executive Director of APSHO, the Advanced Practitioner Society for Hematology and Oncology. And thanks for having me here today. I'm really excited to be here.
Dr. Stephanie Williams: Tammy.
Tammy Triglianos: Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me. And I'm excited to join this group for our conversation today. I'm Tammy Triglianos. I am a certified oncology nurse practitioner practicing in North Carolina. My career has been dedicated to caring for oncology patients, even starting out as a nursing assistant and then as a registered nurse practicing in a variety of settings. I've been a nurse practitioner for almost 20 years now, with the past 15 specializing in GI medical oncology.
Dr. Stephanie Williams: Thank you.
Todd Pickard: Thanks, everybody, for being here today.
Dr. Stephanie Williams: In today's episode, we will be highlighting the services and examples of what advanced practice providers in oncology can do and describing if and how they bill for their services and how they are reimbursed.
So let's get started. Wendy and Tammy, I'm starting in my clinic, 8:30 in the morning. We have a full panel of patients, patients who just need reassessment, chemotherapy prescribed, reevaluation, bone marrow biopsies, test results. How do we work together to see, as a team, these particular patients, or in other words, what can you do to help me through my days as an oncology practitioner?
Wendy Vogel: Wow, that's a great question to just jump right in and start with. I'm excited to talk about that. Well, I think that, you know, as we always are talking about our team approach, we would look at that schedule. And hopefully, the AP and you have their own schedule so that we're able to divide and conquer and be able to accomplish that schedule, see all the patients in the most efficient manner possible. Hopefully, I've looked at all my patients beforehand and see if there's anything that I need to collaborate with you on. Looking at our labs, you know, maybe scans, talking about any changes in plans that we might anticipate together, and so on.
Tammy, would you do the same?
Tammy Triglianos: Yeah, I'd like to echo your point, Wendy. Having independent schedules, I think, makes for a more efficient workflow in the clinic. And in my practice we have a team meeting with our clinical pharmacist, physician, myself, and our nurse navigator, and review last week's and even prep for the upcoming week, trying to anticipate and make sure people are set up and orders are in, and we're prepared for the week to come. Day of, as you know, can get pretty hectic. But since we've done a lot of that prep work, I think it makes for the unknowns that pop up in clinic easier to connect with each other, with my physician and other team members.
Todd Pickard: I agree. I think the great thing about how physicians and APPs work in teams is that the team can decide what's best. I have done everything from having my own independent template so that I have patients that I'm responsible for to a general template where the physician and I just divide and conquer at the beginning of clinic, and we say, "Okay, you see these patients, I'll see these patients, and we'll back each other up if we need to." All the way to seeing every single patient along with the physician when we are seeing a lot of news and consults, very complex, very acutely ill patients. And we basically just work as a team the entire day on everything.
So it's really interesting about the conversation that I think we'll end up doing today is the "what" versus "how." What APPs do is– really, honestly, APPs can do anything and everything unless a state scope of practice or an institution's policy specifically says they can't. That's the good news is that we pretty much can do everything but the "how," that's a really interesting question because a lot of different things come into play. Position preferences, which could be influenced by their own personal experience or their own personal preferences of style versus, you know, having a misunderstanding of what APPs can and can't do. Then there's the institutional policies and the state scope of practices that come into play. So I think this where we'll end up spending some time today.
And, you know, Stephanie, maybe we could start the conversation with you a little bit around physician preferences and what your experience has been, and some of the things that you've noted around the physicians as part of this team.
Dr. Stephanie Williams: I've worked with APPs, both inpatient and outpatient, and I think it is very important to have that team-based approach. Patients really appreciate that, knowing that there is always a provider, someone there that they can turn to. And I think that's one of the great things about APPs is they always seem to be there for patients to turn to and for our nurses to turn to, to get help too. Both our clinic nurses, our infusion nurses, and our inpatient nurses really appreciate having that extra clinical provider available to them. I think as a physician, during my day, what I would like to see is us getting through our panels of patients, whether we're together, which is not as efficient as if we're independently seeing patients, but also help with things like procedures that need to be done on patients, phone calls at the end of the day, peer-to-peer reviews in order to get either medications or tests done for our particular patients. Filling out forms, no one likes doing that. No one likes filling out disability forms or other insurance forms, but those are all things that we all need help with in terms of doing. Ordering consults, seeing new patients together. I work in the transplant field, so they're complicated patients, so it actually is very helpful to have, to see a patient with your advanced practice provider so that you can come up with a treatment plan together that you know you can then follow throughout the course of hopefully that …