AMCCBS Session Spotlight: Growth Strategies and Marketplace Differentiators

Over the last 5 decades, ACCC’s Annual Meeting & Cancer Center Business Summit (AMCCBS) has been a hub for the entire multidisciplinary cancer care team, dedicated to exploring the convergence of business, policy, and technology, all in the name of advancing equitable, high-quality cancer care.

In anticipation of the 2025 AMCCBS, ACCCBuzz spoke with Matt Sturm, partner, ECG Management Consultants, to learn more about his upcoming panel discussion, Growth Strategies and Marketplace Differentiators.

ACCCBuzz: What are some of the trends you have observed that will be highlighted in your panel discussion? 

Matt: We’re seeing a handful of trends among cancer centers. Access is always a challenge everywhere you go in terms of getting new patients in to see doctors. For many programs, there was a lot of investment into cancer care 10 to 15 years ago, but many programs have outgrown that and are now bursting at the seams, wrestling with the question of do we reinvest into the program to expand and create more infrastructure? 

On the other hand, for many centers, oncology is a major financial driver for the health system as a whole. These centers are trying to determine how they can stimulate growth and keep up with market demand. How do they provide what the community needs? Lastly, we’re seeing a rapidly evolving technological landscape. It’s a very dynamic time right now for centers, keeping up with these innovations. 

ACCCBuzz: What kinds of perspectives make up this panel? 

Matt: We intentionally selected several representatives from a mix of different organizations and locations. One individual is from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, one of the largest, most well-known academic cancer centers in the US. We have a panelist from the University of Maryland who can speak to an academic NCI center with a bit more of a regional perspective. Maryland is unique in the economics of how hospitals are paid and have their own challenges in navigating current marketplace trends. Lastly, we have an individual from Inova Schar Cancer, a not-for-profit community health system, so this panelist will have a different lens that is not as heavy on the research but still experiencing a lot of the trends we’ll touch on. 

With this group, we’ll walk through a series of questions and discuss the direction in which their cancer program is moving and how they’re tackling key questions related to growth and differentiation. What is their message to the market from a differentiation perspective? What are their strategic priorities in the short- and long-term? The goal of this panel is to gain perspectives from a variety of organization types to these questions that everybody is wrestling with today. 

ACCCBuzz: What are some of the tactics panelists will discuss for addressing these prevalent issues? 

Matt: Probably the number one challenge and area of conversation today is patient access, so we see a lot of energy and attention going into that topic. One strategy is the core work of just improving day-to-day operations to make the most of the resources, the human capital, and the physical infrastructure that an organization has. Many centers have been on a journey to do that work over the years, and this continues to be a key element. 

From a more strategic, innovative point of view, we’re seeing the advent of diagnostic or pre-diagnostic clinics, the notion being that there is a one-stop shop for individuals who have a suspected cancer, but they have not yet received their confirmed diagnosis. Typically, most oncologists have a whole workup that they require for a patient to go through—labs and diagnostic imaging—to be able to get to a confirmed diagnosis and then to accept the patient into the cancer center. 

Unfortunately, that process can take weeks, if not months, to complete. In many cases, there’s no single individual who quarterbacks that on behalf of or in coordination with the patient—who is then left to figure it out themselves. So, the goal of these clinics is to have one place where the patient goes where there’s a dedicated team who has access to the pathways, protocols, and standards from the oncology team members for the different disease groupings. Then this staff can ensure the patient is equipped with a workup that meets the needs and expectations of other oncology teams. I’ve heard reports of diagnostic clinics cutting waiting time significantly: 1 to 2 weeks, and sometimes even more. 

Another strategy we’re seeing is the use of survivorship clinics. With improved clinical care for cancer, the survivor population is surging, which is excellent news. The downside, however, is that we’ve yet to see a defined process or model for caring for patients after they’ve completed their treatment regimen. Often, these patients continue receiving surveillance by a member of the oncology team—sometimes the surgeon, sometimes medical oncologists—for a long period of time. 

The implication is that every patient, every appointment in a physician's practice takes away time from another patient. Over the course of a decade, a physician is literally seeing thousands of new patients and conducting all of these follow-up visits; it clogs up the system such that their capacity to see new patients is greatly diminished. The notion of survivorship clinics started as a way to provide care to these patients and is now becoming a strategic necessity in light of the limited resources and physicians that we have available.

ACCCBuzz: Why should attendees come to this session? 

Matt: I have found that panel discussions like this, where you bring a variety of leaders from different organizations, end up being what attendees enjoy the most because they like to hear from their peers. They like to hear what others are doing. They like to hear success stories.

The topics we’ll be discussing are relevant to virtually every center. Cancer centers are all in different positions in their willingness, readiness, and ability to tackle these topics. But these are issues everybody is facing, and the panel will provide a diversity of perspectives from different types of organizations, all looking at the same problem and being able to reflect on how they’re approaching it.

With the 51st AMCCBS just weeks away, time to register is running short. Visit the ACCC website for the full agenda to get a preview of the many expert-led sessions lined up for attendees. 

Rachel Radwan is the Editorial Manager for the Association of Cancer Care Centers.