Our four themes for the 2026 Accelerator program are listed above. For more information on these themes, please see details below:
Theme 1: Clinical Trials Reimagined: Access & Research Innovation
Why this matters: Clinical trials are the gateway to tomorrow’s cancer cures—but today fewer than 1 in 20 cancer patients participate. Access is often limited to large academic centers, processes are slow and confusing, and recruitment rarely reflects the diversity of the people cancer impacts. Reimagining trials means accelerating breakthroughs, expanding access, and ensuring every patient—regardless of geography, background, or health literacy—has a fair chance at life-saving innovation.
Key Challenge Areas
- Smarter Patient Matching – Automate and accelerate eligibility checks by linking disparate data sources (EHRs, pathology, genomics, claims) to reduce time and ensure the right patients are identified.
- Trustworthy Consent & Education – Transform how patients and families understand their options with digital tools that make consent clear, human, and empowering.
- Equitable Recruitment at Scale – Support community providers with trial availability databases, decision aids and referral tools so that trial participation is not limited to a few urban centers.
- Research Innovation Infrastructure – Enable data-driven trial design by building tools for real-world evidence integration, biomarker discovery, and novel endpoint measurement.
Theme 2: Bringing Excellence In Cancer Care Closer To Communities
Why this matters: Too often, the quality of cancer care a patient receives depends on where they live. Advanced diagnostics, specialist guidance, and supportive services are concentrated in major cancer centers, leaving rural and underserved patients at risk of worse outcomes. By extending oncology expertise and services into the home and community, we can democratize access to world-class care—improving survival and reducing inequities.
Key Challenge Areas
- Safe oncology-specific hospital-at-home models – Adapt hospital-at-home solutions and infusion protocols safely for cancer treatment.
- Remote monitoring & deterioration prediction – Detect deterioration early and prevent avoidable hospitalizations through biomarkers, wearables, and digital tools.
- Integrated support navigation – Coordinate SDOH needs (transport, housing, food, financial) as part of cancer care through specialized tools.
Theme 3: Smarter Cancer Care Decisions & Operational Excellence
Why this matters: Cancer care today is shaped as much by administrative hurdles as by clinical evidence. Prior authorizations, fragmented data, and documentation burdens consume time that should be spent with patients. At the same time, too many treatment decisions deviate from guidelines or fail to integrate patient values, creating avoidable harm. By uniting smarter decision support with operational excellence, we can ensure every patient receives the right evidence-based care — while reducing friction for clinicians and systems.
Key Challenge Areas
- Personalized patient engagement and outreach – Segment and support patients in ways that improve understanding, adherence, and shared decision-making.
- Guideline concordance at the point of care – Embed evidence-based standards into workflows to reduce unwarranted variation and repetitive testing.
- Operational and data backbone for oncology – Relieve prior auth burden, streamline coverage and revenue-cycle processes, and enable interoperability so care teams can ensure all standard of care has been administered allowing for a focus on patients, not paperwork.
Theme 4: Aligning Payors and Providers to Address Patient Financial Toxicity
Why this matters: Today’s system often rewards high treatment volumes over efficient, high-quality care, driving waste and unsustainable costs. Healthcare stakeholders often lack a deep understanding of patients’ specific needs, limiting personalization that leads to unnecessary spending or denying necessary care prescribed by providers. Digital innovation holds promise to ensure access to quality care and reduce the cost of cancer care. When payors, providers and patients work together and focus on efficiency and value, we can reduce unnecessary dollars spent, ease the financial burden on patients and families, and create a more sustainable, patient-centered model of cancer care.
Key Challenge Areas
- Cost transparency - Provide patients and care partners with cost of care tools to make informed and empowered decisions during treatment planning.
- Patient needs assessment - Use patient engagement tools to better understand patients’ goals and needs in order to tailor supportive services.
- Data driven decision making at the point of care - Empower providers with fair performance data and deeper understanding of their cost and quality metrics to make informed decisions about care delivery.
- Smart care coordination and operational efficiency - Equip cancer centers and provider systems to optimize care delivery, reduce operational waste, and make smarter resource capacity allocation decisions that lower treatment costs while maintaining quality outcomes.
.png?width=190&height=200&name=Pitch%20(1).png)
.png?width=200&height=60&name=Healio%20logo%20(200%20x%2060%20px).png)
