American Oncology Network Celebrates One-Year Anniversary

The American Oncology Network, LLC (AON) highlights its achievements while celebrating its first year of helping community oncologists.

The network’s alliance of physicians and long-time healthcare leaders working towards the ongoing success of community-based oncology has now been operating for a full year. In the past year, AON has partnered with 7 practices in 7 states, bringing almost 50 physicians and over 10 nurse practitioners into their group. There are also 5 more practices in 4 states that plan to join AON in the beginning of the coming year.

“We have made great strides in a very short time,” AON CEO Brad Prechtl, MBA, said in a press release. “Our collaborative approach and physician-led model allows practices to maintain local leadership and autonomy and gain access to expertise and centralized services that are challenging to maintain independently, yet so critical to the delivery of true value-based care.”

Based in Fort Myers, Florida, AON provides services such as pathology and oral-oncolytic pharmacy on top of their access to centralized services, including diagnostics, drug purchasing, fully integrated electronic medical records, financial assistance programs, payer contracting, and revenue cycle management. These features have led them to see better productivity and operations across the practices the organization has partnered with. Additionally, AON Pharmacy is licensed in 46 states and the District of Columbia to provide centralized pharmacy management services to its practices.

“Our partnership has given us exposure to best practices in oncology care and we can clearly see the benefits,” Stephen “Fred” Divers, MD, of Genesis Cancer Center, said in a statement. “The access we now have to centralized laboratory and pathology services, oral-oncolytic pharmacy and clinical trials research, for example, provides enormous benefits to patients that we could not have achieved on our own.”

Genesis, an Arkansas cancer center, joined with AON in September 2018, the same time as the Hematology/Oncology Clinic (HOC) in Baton Rouge and Zachary, Louisiana partnered with AON.

“AON helps us take care of our business so we can focus on our patients,” Gerald Miletello, MD, a medical oncologist with HOC in Baton Rouge, commented in a press release. HOC will be relocating to a new facility in the spring of 2020.

Striving to offer easy and convenient access to experts in oncology who offer a range of treatments and services close to where their patients live, AON plans to give these patients a comfortable environment that can still give the high-quality care that’s needed with lower costs. AON’s executive management team has over 30 years of oncology practice management experience.