ACCC Appoints First Woman to Serve as Executive Director

Published in Oncology News Central
Aug 6, 2024

The Association of Cancer Care Centers (ACCC), formerly the Association of Community Cancer Centers, has hired Meagan O. O’Neill, MS, as its new executive director. O’Neill, who started in the role on July 15, is only the third executive director in the organization’s history and is the first woman to serve in the position. She replaces Christian G. Downs, MHA, JD, who served in the position for more than 20 years and will remain with ACCC as a senior consultant.

“I’m coming in at a really good time because we are celebrating our 50th year anniversary this year, and we also just had a rebranding year,” she told Oncology News Central.

Before joining ACCC, O’Neill previously co-led the oncology services practice for ECG Management Consultants (ECG), a healthcare consulting company with offices in eight states and Washington, D.C. At ECG, many of her clients were ACCC members, and she worked with academic and community practices on initiatives that were both operational and strategic. Through that work, she saw that “ACCC really has a sweet spot in the industry to help the multidisciplinary cancer care team enact improvements and innovations in their practice operations.”

“I’ve held ACCC in high regard for many years, and it was really an exciting opportunity to take similar approaches and work that I was doing in consulting for three to four organizations at a time and affect that change on a much broader scale by helping extend it across the ACCC membership base,” said O’Neill.

ACCC represents more than 40,000 multidisciplinary practitioners who range from doctors to financial navigators to social workers across 2,100 hospitals and practices throughout the United States. For O’Neill, the group’s role in the oncology community is different than those who issue clinical guidance. She sees ACCC as a “how-to organization” that spotlights the things that work differently across various programs and meets practices where they are.

“While we provide support for the clinical side of the industry, we are not telling them what to do. We’re telling them how to [do it], and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach,” O’Neill explained.

In addition to understanding the needs of practices in helping them improve their operations, she brings personal experience as a caregiver. O’Neill’s mother was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer in 2022. Even with her extensive experience in oncology, the challenges her mother faced were “eye-opening and really shocking in the worst way possible.”

“She lived 18 months with the disease. And looking at the opportunities for improvement that I saw as a caregiver really instilled my passion and commitment to do more in this space,” said O’Neill.

As executive director, O’Neill plans to use her experience on both sides of cancer care to help practices provide the highest-quality care through efforts that include earlier diagnosis through screening and prevention and ensuring that patients and caregivers are appropriately navigated to ease their burdens.

“My role is really to help lead the vision forward and carry out our mission, but we have a tremendous team of board members, staff, and technical experts that I’ll get to work alongside who really make that possible,” said O’Neill.