Author(s): Mary Caffrey, Rose McNulty
Source: Evidence-Based Oncology | April 2025 | Issue 04 | Pages: SP220

Key Takeaways

• Texas Oncology partners with Canopy to improve patient outcomes and reduce hospitalizations through electronic feedback management.

• Canopy's tools have shown success in pilot programs, enhancing symptom management and reducing nurses' administrative burdens.

• Integration with iKnowMed EHR and AI-powered continuous care aligns with Texas Oncology's innovation and value-based care goals.

• Canopy's early work demonstrated significant improvements in treatment persistence, hospitalization reduction, and patient engagement.
  
  

Article

Debra Patt, MD, PhD, MBA, executive vice president of Public Policy and Strategy for Texas Oncology, said the practice received positive feedback from nurses and patients during a pilot that concluded in February.

Texas Oncology, a community oncology giant with nearly 1000 providers across 280 locations, announced today it would form a multiyear partnership with Canopy, a continuous care platform that helps practices electronically collect and manage patient feedback, with the goal of preventing hospital stays and improving outcomes.

Canopy, which has grown to serve 2000 providers in a dozen practices, is poised to make its biggest leap yet by scaling to serve one of the largest and best known practices in the country. Part of The US Oncology Network, Texas Oncology sees 71,000 new patients each year and is a leader in both value-based care and clinical research; it is enrolled in the Enhancing Oncology Model (EOM), a Medicare program that requires practices to meet certain performance benchmarks to qualify every 6 months for additional payments.

“Oncologists are seeing the fastest rate of therapeutic innovation in history. With this growing complexity, our practice must also evolve,” R. Steven Paulson, MD, president and CEO of Texas Oncology, said in a statement. “This partnership with Canopy ensures that we remain at the forefront of cancer care, allowing us to set new standards in our approach to each patient’s unique journey.”

In an interview with The American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC), Debra Patt, MD, PhD, MBA, executive vice president of Public Policy and Strategy for Texas Oncology, said, “Canopy has been our partner in innovation. It's one of the things that we really like about working with them. They're quick to adapt the technology when we need it to adapt with additional functionality, thinking about the need to support patients on oral oncolytics, thinking about specific disease states that need different kinds of support or therapy interventions that require different types of support. They've been great collaborators as we innovate and change.”

“Partnering with Texas Oncology is a pivotal step in our mission to make continuous care the standard for all cancer patients,” Lavi Kwiatkowsky, CEO and founder of Canopy, said in the statement. “Texas Oncology’s forward-thinking approach and dedication to embracing innovation make them an ideal partner. Together, we aim to set a new benchmark for AI-powered, continuous oncology care.”

Today’s announcement follows a recent pilot in Texas Oncology’s Amarillo clinic, in which Patt said Canopy had “had substantially higher adoption rates” than another platform in use at the clinic.

“This means the symptom management tools have a better opportunity to serve patients,” Patt said.

During the pilot, which began in October 2024 and ran through February 2025, Patt said Texas Oncology received positive feedback, both from the nursing staff and from patients.

“The feedback from our nursing staff has been that they're able to spend less time on the documentation burden, because there are digital tools—AI among them—that allow Canopy’s use of symptom management pathways and documentation to patients and in the medical record to be more seamless,” she said.

“If we thought that our nurses were spending 50% of their time being nurses and 50% of their time on the administrative burden of the tasks at hand of patient symptom management, we see that migrating to closer to an 80-to-20 shift. I think that evolution is important in the wake of a staffing crisis that we all see. And anchoring on to where we started, Texas Oncology has continued to make investments in value-based care, and we want our people to act top of license so we can do that efficiently and effectively.”

Texas Oncology, as a practice, and Patt individually were early leaders in the use of technology for symptom management to improve patient outcomes. Patt previously led studies involving a different platform, Navigating Cancer, which Texas Oncology selected as a triage management tool in 2020.1

In September 2024, a different community oncology network, OneOncology, purchased Navigating Cancer. Patt said Texas Oncology would continue to have a relationship with Navigating Cancer.

To prepare for the launch of the partnership, Canopy has integrated with iKnowMed, the electronic health record (EHR) developed by Ontada, the McKesson oncology technology and insights company. Canopy has become a member of the Ontada Developer Marketplace. McKesson supports The US Oncology Network, whose member practices remain independent.

In an interview with AJMC, Kwiatkowsky shared how he created Canopy in 2018 after seeing family members suffer needlessly with cancer. He was inspired by research presented in 2017 by Ethan Basch, MD, at the American Society of Clinical Oncology plenary session, which showed that electronic remote symptom monitoring could improve overall survival by 5 months—as good as some novel therapies at a far lower cost.2

Kwiatkowsky described how Canopy took on one challenge at a time in its early work with Highlands Oncology, a small but highly regarded practice in Northwest Arkansas.

“It was very clear to us that to make this successful, we need to make the practice successful,” he said. “So, it doesn't matter how many life-threatening symptoms or issues or adverse events we find, if the practice doesn't tackle them quickly and efficiently in a standardized fashion, it's not going to help anyone. It's going to sit on some queue somewhere.”

The system launched with Highlands in 2020, has been slowly refined ever since. “We started with remote monitoring,” Kwiatkowsky said. Next came algorithms to triage the most urgent matters, then came support for nurses, followed by workflows and decision support.

Results for Canopy’s early work with Highlands drew attention. Results published in 2022 by ASCO included a 45% improvement in treatment persistence, a 22% reduction in hospitalizations and emergency department visits per 100 patient months, and 88% patient engagement sustained at 6 months.

More recent data published at the 2024 American Society of Hematology meeting showed improved early detection of toxicity among patients being treated with bispecifics and a 37% reduction in treatment discontinuation.

Reimbursement. Because Canopy allows practices to identify and address symptoms patients experience between visits, practices are able to capture reimbursement through programs available through CMS, such as Principal and Chronic Care Management (PCM/CCM) and Remote Therapeutic Monitoring (RTM).

Today, as the move is on to bring complex therapies into community practice settings, Kwiatkowsky said Canopy is working on tools to help practices administer bispecific antibodies and antibody drug conjugates.

In addition to Texas Oncology and Highlands, Canopy provides supports several community oncology practices including New York Cancer & Blood Specialists and Oncology Consultants, based in Houston, Texas.

References

1. Patt DA, Patel AM, Hudson KE, et al. Impact of remote symptom monitoring with electronic patient-reported outcomes on hospitalization, survival, and cost in community oncology practice: the Texas Two-Step study. JCO Clin Cancer Inform. 2023;7 Published online October 28, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1200/CCI.23.0018
2. Basch EM, Deal AM, Dueck AC, et al. Overall survival results of a randomized trial assessing patient-reported outcomes for symptom monitoring during routine cancer treatment.J Clin Oncol. 2017;35(suppl 18): Abstract LBA2. https://doi.org/10.1200/JCO.2017.35.18_suppl.LBA2