8 DECEMBER 2025IN MY OPINIONA bit of context, I am an engineer by education. I have been in healthcare for 25 years, first working for medical oncologists in a private practice. I was with that group for 16 years. The practice was an innovative and forward-thinking group; I was hired to help them implement an EMR before EMRs were mainstream. Over time, I found myself less interested in the systems and software and more interested in learning and understanding oncology. I would tell the physicians that, while the EMR would help them practice medicine better, the true value is that the data collected would help them run their business better and inform them of clinical "behaviors." That held true in the latter years, when the practice was in financial straits, and it was the data that identified some of the issues. I ascended to managing the overall practice and was asked to address the financial issues. While I was able to stabilize the practice, the marketplace was changing. Bigger institutions were coming into the practice catchment area and shifting the market unfavorably to the group. In 2016, I/we sold the practice to the University of Pennsylvania Health System. I had no intentions of staying with Penn; I was going to go do something on my own. Before that happened, I met Dr. David Porter, the Director of BMT, who had a vision of developing a freestanding Center for Cell Therapy that supports these treatments beyond cancer. That's where we are today.EXPANDING ACCESS WITH FLEXIBLE CARE MODELSPenn, as the creator of the CAR T therapy Kymriah (licensed to Novartis), has extensive experience in treating patients in both inpatient and outpatient settings. That experience first came in research, years before Kymriah was FDA approved for pediatric ALL. After FDA approval of CAR T for DLBCL and understanding that just because a therapy is safe for outpatient use does not mean that the patient should be treated in the outpatient setting, we also developed payment models from commercial payers that recognized the services that the institution provides in return for greater flexibility to manage patients in the appropriate site of care. As a result of these experiences, and driven in part due to the COVID pandemic, we realized that access to these treatments needs to improve. The mantra within the program became "Instead of the patient coming where the treatment is, the treatment should go to where the patient is." So, we expanded access by setting up two community hospitals, with little or no experience administering CAR T, to serve unique populations of patients that would not usually come to our Academic Medical Center. DATA GUIDES CLINICAL AND FINANCIAL DECISIONSIt's important to understand that CCTT isn't looking at just oncology analytics as we prepare for a future state where multiple disease groups will offer cell therapy. Cell therapy, inclusive of CAR T and BMT, will soon (hopefully) extend FROM DATA TO DELIVERY: SCALING ACCESS TO CELL THERAPYBy Robert Richards, Corporate Director of The Center for Cell Therapy and Transplant, Penn Medicine, University of Pennsylvania Health SystemRobert Richards
< Page 7 | Page 9 >