#ACCCNOC: Little Big Bangs—Innovation in Action

The ACCC 39th National Oncology Conference (#ACCCNOC) is happening in West Palm Beach, Fla., this week! “Our hope is that you all leave here with key takeaways, tangible solutions, and most importantly, the inspiration to return home and truly make a difference in your cancer program or practice,” said ACCC President Dr. David Penberthy as he opened the meeting. ACCC is back in person to support the multidisciplinary cancer care team through education and networking opportunities—and yesterday’s sessions truly delivered on Dr. Penberthy and the association’s goals.

Healthcare—especially oncology—is rife with competing demands that make it particularly challenging to engage oncology staff in innovation. Even when your days are already packed, budgets are limited, and ideas are either non-existent or overwhelming, innovation is possible through “little big bangs” (or micro-innovations). Julie Holmes, innovation and tech-xpert, engaged #ACCCNOC attendees through an interactive keynote address, offering a new approach to innovation that leverages technology and focuses on finding and delivering everyday improvements that add up to big results for cancer care teams and their patients.

Who’s in the Room?

In answering Holmes’ first polling question (“Who are you?”), attendees covered the entire healthcare team—from administrators, oncology program and clinic managers, and nurses to financial advocates, physicians, nurse navigators, and reimbursement specialists—as well as industry representatives. When asked about the biggest challenges people are facing, common themes emerged, including:

• Staffing and retention
• Staff engagement and morale
• Staff experiencing fatigue and burnout
• Patient access to care
• Billing efficiency
• Time constraints
• Financial success.

While many cancer programs and practices are struggling with similar problems, Holmes shared a startling statistic. “85 percent of organizations are bad at diagnosing problems, and 87 percent of executives said [that] this flaw carried significant costs,” adding that innovation is key to overcoming these challenges. A common theme in Holmes’ keynote: healthcare innovations do not need to be large in scale. Instead, these innovations—especially as they’re applied to enhancing cancer care delivery and the patient experience—can come in many shapes and sizes. What may be deemed by one as a small-scale innovation, could positively impact the patient experience more broadly than expected. Yet, “even in the best of times, innovation can be hard,” Holmes said. “And these are not the best of times right now.”

Lessons and Rules

To assist attendees in how to best approach innovation before putting solutions into action, Holmes shared what guiding principles she uses to identify and implement “little big bangs.” First, and foremost, Holmes shared that everyone, everywhere needs to “take a time out.” By not allowing the time and space to really step back from a problem and evaluate truly helpful solutions, you can stifle creativity. And by constantly being in a rush to complete your laundry list of work, you lose time in the day that could be dedicated to innovation. 

Holmes’ next lesson centered on bias—the beliefs, interpretations, assumptions, and stories that affect our daily lives and interactions. In an activity where Holmes asked audience members to “draw a flying horse,” many sketched out a Pegasus, which is, in fact, a horse with wings. To drive her point home, Holmes shared that one’s biases could be so clear they impacted this activity. While a Pegasus is quite literally “a flying horse,” Holmes shared how more thoughtful (and perhaps easier) solutions to her direction would be drawing a horse with a cape or a horse on a plane. “We are burned by our bias,” she said, adding that innovations aren’t necessarily the first ideas that come to mind like the Pegasus mentioned above. Instead, the more thoughtful solutions are often creative, potentially resource saving, and may better address challenges in the long term.

Finally, Holmes spoke to the modern day—how technology, even simple technology that auto populates and automates tedious staff processes and workflows can be the answer to the problem. With the question, “What are you asking your staff to repeat?” Holmes challenged attendees to re-evaluate their daily processes to think about how technology could be used to ease workloads and effectively address morale and burnout rates. Additionally, Holmes suggested that everyone “stretch their tech,” meaning that they look at what technology is already in use but isn’t being utilized to its full potential. This could mean dedicating staff members to specialize in specific platforms, who can address how new features can be used to innovate care delivery. When implementing these practices, Holmes emphasizes the need to adjust for the future and announce these “little big bangs” in advance (before applying them into practice). This will ensure the successful implementation of any innovation.

In closing her keynote, Holmes shared: “Take action by taking a time out, fill in a blank, tech something up, and skip ahead.” Doing so provides the opportunity to take time to truly evaluate the problem and implement creative solutions to positively impact the patient experience and potentially patient outcomes. “Innovation is viable and attainable,” she said. “Your teams have incredible ideas if you give them the space to innovate.”

A Day Dedicated to Innovation

The rest of the morning’s sessions continued discussions on innovation in oncology practice by celebrating the 2022 ACCC Innovator Award winners. These sessions provided attendees the how-to perspective on identifying and implementing creative solutions to common challenges, including lessons learns and tools, that they can take home and use in their cancer program or practice. More information on this year’s ACCC Innovator Award winners can be found on the ACCC website.

Stay tuned for a final post covering today’s sessions at #ACCCNOC.