Collaborative Care: A Solution for Providing Optimal Psychosocial Oncology Care - Getting Started with Collaborative Care in Oncology-Session 1

Video Transcription

Video Summary

The webinar introduced ACCC’s mission and its partners AOSW and APOS, then focused on improving psychosocial care for cancer patients through collaborative care. Dr. William Pearl described a major mental health crisis in the U.S., with too few providers and limited access, including for people with cancer. He argued that cancer centers are seeing more patients than ever while community mental health access declines, making the current referral-based model insufficient.<br /><br />Dr. Jesse Phan presented collaborative care as a better, population-based model that improves access, engagement, coordination, follow-up, and reimbursement. He explained that collaborative care is more than co-location or informal collaboration: it is a structured, evidence-based system using universal screening, care managers, measurement-based treatment, caseload review, and stepped care. He also described how social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, navigators, and oncology teams work together to treat patients efficiently and keep them from falling through the cracks.<br /><br />Dr. Pearl then shared Dana-Farber’s experience integrating psychosocial oncology with palliative care across multiple sites, including a successful pilot and plans for broader rollout. Both speakers emphasized that collaborative care can expand reach without proportionally increasing staff, improve patient and provider satisfaction, and support sustainable, value-based care. The session ended by previewing a follow-up webinar on implementation details, staffing, and pilot planning.

Keywords

ACCC

collaborative care

psychosocial oncology

cancer patients

mental health access

measurement-based treatment

care coordination

palliative care

value-based care