Chapter 11: Global Programs Devoted to Spreading MD Anderson’s Multi-Disciplinary Care Models
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Description
Dr. Bogler begins by noting that because the MD Anderson model involves evidence-based, research driven care, MD Anderson also requires that partners include research (clinical trials) in their operations. The institution also requires that partner provide monthly metrics to track clinical quality.
Dr. Bogler then discusses the challenges of implementing these requirements in domestic versus international partners and the differing expectations of quality that can result. At the end of this Chapter, Dr. Bogler stresses how excited he is about the prospect of bringing MD Anderson’s experience and knowledge to international centers. He says that the expansion is so much more than a commercial venture. “We can’t implement programs for free.”
Identifier
BoglerO_01_20141110_C011
Publication Date
11-11-2014
Publisher
The Historical Resources Center, Research Medical Library, The University of Texas Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Oliver Bogler, PhD, Oral History Interview, November 10, 2014
Keywords
Institutional Mission and Values; Beyond the Institution; Multi-disciplinary Approaches; MD Anderson Impact; Institutional Processes; Institutional Mission and Values; The Business of MD Anderson; The MD Anderson Brand, Reputation; Global Issues –Cancer, Health, Medicine; This is MD Anderson
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - Institutional Mission and Values; Beyond the Institution; Multi-disciplinary Approaches; MD Anderson Impact; Institutional Processes; Institutional Mission and Values; The Business of MD Anderson; The MD Anderson Brand, Reputation; Global Issues –Cancer, Health, Medicine; This is MD Anderson
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And that’s actually exactly the question I wanted to ask—
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Yeah, how do you coordinate it.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
—because, you know, there’s the educational mission, but as I understand—and I keep harping on that or going back to that as kind of touchstone, because, you know, the multidisciplinary care at MD Anderson is one of the hallmarks. You know, there’s the MD Anderson way of delivering care, and part of the mission of all of these areas is to help spread that particular method.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Right. But in a very different way. So I think you’ve put your finger on a really important point. So now I think the close coordination between Amy Hay and her department and GAP, the reason that particularly is so critical is because of the sort of scenarios that we work through on an almost weekly basis. So we will get a contact from outside from a prospective partner, and the partner could be a private group with a Greenfield project to build a hospital in India or in China, and they’re, “We’re going to build a cancer hospital,” or, “We’re going to build a hospital with a cancer program. MD Anderson, please teach us how to build this cancer program.” Or it might be an established group. We have a relationship in Peru, for example, with a group called Oncosalud. Now, it’s an interesting example because Oncosalud is a private oncology group, and one of the founders and directors of that, Dr. Carlos Vallejos—and Vallejos is V-a-l-l-e-j-o-s—he is a former fellow at MD Anderson, he was here for quite a few years, and he was the Minister of Health in Peru, and then he was the Director of the National Cancer Institute. We have a purely academic sister institution relationship with the National Cancer Institute in Peru to do academic work. Then when he’s retired from that position and went back to his private practice group, he also wanted a relationship, and he came to us and said, “How can we work together?” And it turns out that the best model for this group is really with Amy, not so much with GAP. But he knew GAP, so he came to GAP first. So with the coordination that we’ve really established now, we’re working together with his group to make sure he gets the relationship he wants. So let me define that for you. When you come to GAP and you form a relationship with GAP, it’s purely an academic interaction. First of all, there’s no fee involved. There’s no money involved. None of the members of our network pay any membership fee or anything like that. And what you gain access to is really the GAP team, which is currently ten people, and their work to network you and support collaborations and, say, put on conferences with you, or if you come to visit with the team, we’ll build an agenda for you and make sure you meet with the right people. We run other programs that you can participate in, an annual conference, a C-grant [phonetic] program, and I can talk a little bit more about those as well, but the core of it is that you really connect with us. And, of course, you can come here, for example, and you can meet with faculty and even administrative staff, and you can ask them, “How does your cancer program run?” and they’ll tell you. They’ll tell you. You’ll get different opinions, depending on who you talk to and whether you’re in the Breast Center or in the Head and Neck Center or what have you. And then you can take notes and you can go home and try and make those work. And that’s what GAP is about. If you want MD Anderson to have a structured interaction with you, come in and study your market and your organization and do essentially what Amy calls a GAP analysis, which is an analysis of where you are today and where you would be if you were in our approach or at our level, so to speak, and then you want guidance on how to get there, that is not done by us, that’s done by Amy, and that’s on a consultancy basis. It’s a fee-based basis. Both of these things have existed for a while, and Dr. Mendelsohn essentially built both of these programs to satisfy different external requests, because people were coming to him and to other people and saying, “We want to work with you.” Okay. You want to do academic stuff, here’s the door. Or, “No, we want you to teach us everything you’ve learned over seventy years and help us implement it.” Well, that’s a different kettle of fish. I mean, Anderson can’t, as a state institution with obligations to be good stewards of our resources, we cannot take our clinical staff or even our administrative staff and send them to other countries for weeks to build cancer programs. We need to offset the loss of resources that that would entail with a fee-based consultancy, and that’s what Amy does. So the coordination that we have now established, I think, is working pretty well—you should ask Amy for a second opinion, but I think she would agree—in trying to make sure that people, when they come to us, that they go through the right door, and sometimes it’s both doors and sometimes it’s not that simple. People may want a little bit of both, or, frankly, sometimes they think they really want one, but then they really actually want the other. With Oncosalud, one of the conversations we’ve had in the past year—because right now they have an MOU with us here in GAP—they would love to do marketing. They would love to tell the people of Peru that they’re working with MD Anderson. Well, under our agreement, they really cannot do any marketing. They can put a sign up in their institution telling people that they’re working with us on academic programs, and they have such a sign, and that’s appropriate, but they can’t do media advertising with MD Anderson’s identity, because they’re not. Now, if they sign up with Amy’s program like São Paulo did, Albert Einstein in São Paulo, the Albert Einstein Hospital, which is the first international associate in the Cancer Network, that’s a formal designation from Amy’s program. That means that Amy and her team and clinicians from MD Anderson have vetted the program and have said it meets certain standards, and now they are in a different position. That’s a consultancy-based relationship, and that just happened a few months ago, they can now do advertising on that basis. So it’s a different kind of relationship, and so ultimately it’s not that—it’s fairly self-evident. They want very different things. But it’s surprising how much explanation sometimes we have to do in the marketplace to get people to understand what the difference is, because they—you know, with Amy it’s very structured. It’s like working with a consultant who will tell you what you need to do. Now, whether you do it or not, that’s your business. But they’ll tell you the steps, and they’ll tell you the steps from where you are today to where you need to be to get that designation, the international associate designation that allows you then to do certain things that you might want to do. So that’s the current offerings, and I think it’s working really well, and I’m very excited about the international possibilities, because I travel the world and I see the desire that there is for learning how we deal with cancer. And we have seventy-years-plus of accumulated experience and knowledge, and I completely understand why institutions that are starting now or have perhaps not had the opportunity to get as far as we have, why they would want to simply learn from us. Why not? I mean, it costs money, but so does seventy years of development, right, so it makes a lot of sense.
Recommended Citation
Rosolowksi, Tacey A. PhD and Bogler, Oliver PhD, "Chapter 11: Global Programs Devoted to Spreading MD Anderson’s Multi-Disciplinary Care Models" (2014). Interview Chapters. 1565.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1565
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