The Oncology Warrior
April 22, 2024
Access to oncology treatments drives patient champion Alan Birch
Alan Birch likes to keep things simple. Currently the Associate Director, Provider Solutions, Oncology, at Sentrex, Birch worked for years as a drug access facilitator for Toronto hospitals. “My job was to help patients access cancer medications as quickly and easily as possible,” he recalls. “I was the person who worked to remove roadblocks and simplify the processes.”
This philosophy served Alan well when he became a director at the Oncology Drug Access Navigators of Ontario (ODANO), where he taught less experienced colleagues to navigate the drug access landscape. The website odano.ca, which he created, gives drug access navigators the knowledge and tools to help oncology patients access the medications they need. Alan also operates drugaccess.ca, a database of PSP enrollment forms as well as offering six free training modules for drug access navigators. “Drug access navigators speed up the time to access treatment for patients, which is critical in oncology,” he says. “I’d love to see them used for mental health conditions and rare diseases.”
“We need to keep consolidating the oncology space. It’s in everyone’s interest to make access simpler and faster.”
At Sentrex, Alan continues to work on streamlining the fragmented specialty treatment landscape – for example, the patient support programs (PSPs) often associated with specialty drugs. Here again, his keep-it-simple approach came to the rescue: he created an oncology support program that combines 21 oral and injected drugs from multiple manufacturers into a one-stop program. More are added every year. “With so many different PSPs in circulation, and especially for patients needing more than one at a time, consolidation is a necessity,” he notes. “Integrating PSPs also allows patients to access combination therapies as a singe unit.”
Alan doesn’t intend to stop there: “We need to keep consolidating the oncology space. There are dozens of treatments out there in silos. It’s in everyone’s interest to make access simpler and faster.”