Atlas Oncology Partners:
Building Smarter Risk Models with Data Precision and Iterative Innovation
The Vision: Bringing a Connected, Compassionate Model for Value-based Cancer Care
When the team at Atlas Oncology Partners set out to create an embedded partner to oncologists, delivering whole-person care with compassion, innovation, and accountability, they were driven by a simple but ambitious goal: to enable connected, responsive, and uplifting cancer care — during treatment and beyond.
Atlas’s novel, full-risk, longitudinal value-based payment approach provides a sustainable business model for delivering enhanced patient-centered services as part of their oncology care experience with partner practices. To make this possible, the Atlas team required a system capable of scenario modeling, payor-specific logic, and unparalleled precision, thereby creating a foundation for financial, clinical, and operational decision-making.
That’s where Ursa Health came in.
The Challenge: Navigating Complexity at Scale
Success in value-based oncology contracting requires balancing actuarial rigor with real-world pragmatism. Atlas brought a sophisticated, yet operational, approach to defining the population of patients with cancer and associated clinical and financial performance measures. At the same time, they were negotiating with multiple payors, each bringing unique attribution logic, patient eligibility criteria, and cost models to the table.
Minor discrepancies in definitions — such as how “eligible” patients are identified or how cost trends are calculated — can create confusion, slow decisionmaking, and undermine trust between partners. For Atlas, achieving alignment meant ensuring that everyone was operating from a shared, clinically grounded understanding of the patient population and the goals of the contract. As Dr. David Johnson, Chief Physician Executive of Atlas Oncology Partners, put it, “Clarity in definitions is essential. When payors and providers start from the same shared understanding, collaboration becomes far more effective and patient care ultimately benefits.”
It wasn’t sufficient to rely on an actuarial model academically calibrated in isolation against theoretical benchmarks. Instead, the Atlas team needed the ability to test, compare, and validate payor-requested contract terms dynamically, exploring what-if scenarios side by side, with confidence in every assumption.
The Solution: The Ursa Multiverse and Precision Parameters
Working with Ursa Health, Atlas deployed a solution that transformed how it models risk and engages with payors. Dr. Johnson and other Atlas leaders partnered with Ursa Health’s expert professional services team to translate their population intelligence into novel Atlas IP authored using Ursa Studio. By combining encounters, diagnoses, claims, medications, and other essential data, Atlas gained a sophisticated engine for patient identification, risk stratification, and provider attribution, all organized into a population funnel analysis that could flexibly integrate any Ursa-loaded claims data package.
This custom Contract Management Module gave Atlas the flexibility to work seamlessly with payors and accommodate each organization’s unique requirements.When a payor required a modification, Ursa activated what’s referred to internally as the “Multiverse” — a framework that lets Atlas run multiple attribution and pricing scenarios simultaneously.
Instead of rebuilding reports or rerunning analyses each time parameters shifted, Ursa’s system enabled Atlas to toggle key assumptions such as inclusion/exclusion criteria, lookback periods, and qualifying encounters to quickly compare financial and population impacts.
This parameterized model allowed Atlas to simulate payor-specific definitions and test contract variants without losing historical context. As one Ursa team member put it:
Delivering Impact: Precision, Efficiency, and Negotiation Power
The results were immediate. What once required onerous manual analysis could now be accomplished in minutes. Atlas gained the ability to model contracts across multiple payors, rapidly iterating on contract terms and quantifying the impact of each assumption.
This precision proved invaluable during payor negotiations. Not only could Atlas demonstrate the financial and clinical implications of proposed contract changes — backed by transparent, reproducible data — but the payors themselves trusted the integrity of the Ursa-generated outputs. This mutual confidence created a shared analytical foundation where both sides could align on definitions, validate assumptions, and avoid the common pitfall of using the same terminology while meaning entirely different things. As a result, conversations became clearer, more collaborative, and far less susceptible to misunderstanding. Taken together, these capabilities allow the Multiverse to support Atlas’s value-based contracts from early business development through program operations and all the way to reconciliation.
Reflecting on Atlas’s journey, Dr. Johnson emphasized that data precision and transparency are the bedrock of successful payor partnerships:
Conclusion
For Atlas Oncology Partners, value-based care began with a commitment to delivering highquality, seamlessly connected, compassionate, and financially sustainable cancer care. Ursa Health provided the data operating system to make that vision real by transforming contracting from a labor-intensive, retrospective process into a dynamic, evidence-based discipline that accelerates decisions and safeguards the financial viability of value-based oncology.
Today, Atlas can model risk with precision, negotiate with transparency, and innovate with confidence, all while strengthening payor relationships and preserving the autonomy of community oncologists. The partnership shows what’s possible when data accuracy and clinical insight work in full alignment. With a flexible modeling infrastructure and a commitment to transparency, Atlas now has the clarity needed to navigate oncology risk contracting at scale.
Atlas is not simply managing risk, but rather redefining what responsible, patient-centered oncology care can look like. Through collaboration, precision, and a shared commitment to integrity, Atlas and Ursa are building a model where data drives action, action drives outcomes, and every decision supports compassionate, connected cancer care.
Read additional success stories from some of our other clients:
- IntoValue – we created a shared, demo-ready analytics environment to support direct contracting between health systems and self-insured employers.
- Matter Health – we unified claims, EHR, quality, and risk-adjustment data to drive high-touch care and performance gains for seniors in affordable housing.
- HarmonyCares – we maintained analytics integrity through a complex EMR migration while sustaining top-tier ACO performance across MSSP and ACO REACH.
- Altitude – we paired Ursa's data foundation with clinician activation tools to turn analytics into personalized, within-workflow actions that drive behavior change.
- Cityblock – we built a multi-source quality engine to move beyond compliance and focus care teams on closing real gaps for complex Medicaid and Medicare populations.