Canopy is launching a multiyear partnership with Texas Oncology, one of the country’s largest community-based cancer care providers.
The collaboration builds upon a successful pilot project held at one of Texas Oncology’s clinics and will extend Canopy’s digital platform across a network that spans nearly 1,000 providers and 280 locations in the state.
Canopy supports care teams by leveraging remote monitoring and AI to capture the symptoms patients may experience between visits. It helps practices identify and prioritize those who need help while also assisting with automated reimbursement capture.
“It’s our mission in Texas Oncology to provide the highest quality of cancer care close to home,” Debra Patt, M.D., Ph.D., executive vice president of public policy and strategy for Texas Oncology, told Fierce Healthcare.
Patients in active treatment have the option to enroll in Canopy to report their symptoms. “We know that it will improve our symptom response time, and we’ve already demonstrated it will lead to better symptom control, reduced ER visits, reduced hospitalization and reduced total cost of care,” Patt noted.
Texas Oncology has more than 100 nurses working virtually to monitor and support patient symptoms. Canopy collects and compiles patient-reported data for care teams to see and triage. “While that seems arbitrary, our ability to have a systematic way to address patient symptoms … allows us to really follow our response time as a key performance indicator,” Patt said. A quick response time is important for timely intervention. In February, this team’s average response time was 40 minutes.
It works like this: Say a patient recently began chemotherapy and is experiencing nausea or vomiting. That could deter them from continuing their treatment. Canopy can identify and highlight this in a specific management pathway. Nurses can then characterize how severe the symptom is and prescribe an intervention. Because Canopy integrates with iKnowMed, an EHR for oncology practices also used by Texas Oncology, it can populate documentation in the record. Canopy also recommends appropriate follow-up items to care teams, such as when a patient may need to be seen in person.
“By being on a patient-reported outcomes instrument, and by having remote therapy monitoring and detecting any abnormalities … it allows me to have better control over their disease management and allows them to stay on effective therapy longer,” Patt said.
There is a growing recognition that remote therapy monitoring should be the standard of care, Patt said, but many practices have yet to implement it. This change at scale might take years and would require adjusting workflows and finding a vendor, before onboarding patients and more. “There is still this curve of adoption that takes time,” she said.
In the future, moving cancer care to the outpatient setting would help patients stay at home and reduce the total cost of care, Patt noted. But, for success, practices need effective monitoring tools. Canopy and Texas Oncology hope this partnership lays the groundwork for more aggressive therapies to be given outside the hospital in the future.
“This is an aspirational thing for us, it’s something we’re hoping to partner on,” Lavi Kwiatkowsky, founder and CEO of Canopy, told Fierce Healthcare.
Another key aspect for Texas Oncology is reimbursement. While there have been remote therapeutic monitoring reimbursement codes since 2022, Texas Oncology has put 80,000 patients on remote monitoring over the years and has not billed for it. As the practice looks to make deeper investments in value-based care, Texas Oncology hopes to get paid for this type of work, Patt said. And this is exactly the type of work that Canopy enables.
Later this year, Canopy plans to launch a new feature that will predraft responses to patient messages for clinicians, Kwiatkowsky said. “We’re not trying to explain to them about their symptoms or give them medical advice, we don’t touch that,” he said. But by drafting responses to questions involving scheduling, for example, “we’re able to save this valuable time.”
Canopy says it has seen a 45% improvement in treatment persistence after three months as well as a 22% reduction in ER visits and hospitalizations per 100 patient months, along with 88% sustained patient engagement at six months. It has also led to a 37% reduction in treatment discontinuation at three months and improved the early detection of toxicities with bispecific antibody therapies, according to the company. Today, Canopy is contracted with 10% of providers treating cancer in the U.S.