From Oct. 12-14, 2022, the Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC) hosted its 39th National Oncology Conference (#ACCCNOC) in West Palm Beach, Fla. Members of the multidisciplinary cancer care team and industry convened to attend dynamic sessions that discussed the future of oncology care, innovations in action, and how to best support the oncology workforce. A combination of networking, didactic, and discussion-based opportunities offered attendees a refreshing (and "back to normal") conference dedicated to learning and meeting colleagues.
The Future of Oncology
On Wednesday, Oct. 12, #ACCCNOC opened with concurrent education events: The Institute for the Future of Oncology and the ACCC Financial Advocacy Network Pre-Conference. The first was dedicated to ACCC President Dr. David R. Penberthy's 2022-2023 theme: "Leveraging Technology to Transform Cancer Care Delivery and the Patient Experience." He opened the institute by posing this question to attendees: What does the future of cancer care delivery look like? Then subject matter experts and thought leaders attempted to answer this query through different lenses, including technology giant Google Health, a medical oncologist social influencer, an operational and business innovator, and-most importantly-the patient. The institute drove home the idea that technology is the major player here in improving high-quality, comprehensive care delivery-from early detection of the disease and patient education to patient outcomes and more.
Next door, the ACCC Financial Advocacy Network Pre-Conference was dedicated to discussions on guideline-concordant financial navigation teams and services. To assist cancer programs and practices in building and supporting financial navigation teams, the network presented a draft update to its Financial Advocacy Services Guidelines (originally published in 2018), which used the Delphi method to create informed, inclusive, and consensus-based guidelines. The draft was shared with pre-conference attendees, who discussed how ACCC could best support them and others in recognizing and implementing the financial navigation services deemed essential to oncology care, as noted in the guidelines. Though these guidelines are not the final say so in oncology financial navigation, ACCC and the network are hopeful that they will provide the support that has been missing in the field for years once published in early 2023.
Little Big Bangs-Innovation in Action
Health care-especially oncology-is rife with competing demands that make it particularly challenging to engage oncology staff in innovation. Even when one's 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 on Thursday, Oct. 13, offering a novel 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.
To assist attendees in how to best approach innovation before putting solutions into action, Holmes shared her own guiding principles to identify and implement "little big bangs." First and foremost, Holmes shared that everyone, everywhere needs to "take a time out." Holmes' next lesson centered on bias-the beliefs, interpretations, assumptions, and stories that affect our daily lives and interactions. Innovations are not necessarily the first ideas that come to mind. Instead, the more thoughtful solutions are often creative, potentially resource saving, and may better address challenges in the long term.
Finally, Holmes spoke to how technology-even simple technology that auto populates and automates tedious staff processes and workflows-can be the answer to a 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. In closing her keynote, Holmes encourage attendees to "take action by taking a time out, fill in a blank, tech something up, and skip ahead." Doing so provides the opportunity to truly evaluate the problem and implement creative solutions to positively impact the patient experience and outcomes. "Innovation is viable and attainable," she said. "Your teams have incredible ideas if you give them the time and space to innovate."
The day continued with sessions dedicated to innovation in oncology practice by celebrating the five 2022 ACCC Innovator Award winners. These sessions provided attendees how-to perspectives on:
* Addressing social determinants of health through a medical-legal partnership
* Embedding primary care in oncology
* Implementing a remote patient monitoring program
* Expediting cancer treatment through a rapid access APP-led diagnostic clinic
* Deploying technology across an interdisciplinary team to improve oral oncolytic compliance
Supporting the Oncology Workforce
Friday, Oct. 14, closed out #ACCCNOC with presentations from its three ACCC Award winners-Carmen Guerra, MD, MSCE, FACP; Leana Cabrera Chien, MSN, RN, GCNS-BC, GNP-BC; and Lola Fashoyin-Aje, MD, MPH-followed by a series of concurrent breakout sessions aimed at helping oncology staff with emergent challenges like leveraging AI-enabled data analytics to support the workforce, preparing for population health, developing an oncology leadership pipeline, improving recruitment, retention and professional develop, and more.
ACCC was excited to finally be back in-person for #ACCCNOC to offer all members of the multidisciplinary cancer care team, industry, and more the space to convene, learn, and return to their cancer programs with lessons, strategies, and tools to put in practice-ultimately improving person-centered, high-quality cancer care.
Join ACCC for Its Next In-Person Education Opportunity
Like this content? Consider joining your colleagues at the ACCC 49th Annual Meeting and Cancer Center Business Summit, March 8-10, in Washington DC., to hear Kevin Davies, PhD, Executive Editor of The CRISPR Journal and author of "Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing," deliver a keynote on "Precision Medicine: Stories from the CRISPR Revolution" and Andre Harvin, PharmD, who will share information about robotic pharmacists, a biosimilar strategy that saved one health system millions, and more "tales from the pharmacy." Learn more at http://accc-cancer.org/AMCCBS.
#AMCCBS
* Register at http://accc-cancer.org/AMCCBS
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