October 15, 2026Cancer programs are expected to do more than ever before, often with fewer resources to do it, with pressures on healthcare leaders becoming increasingly difficult to navigate.
For many healthcare executives, the central challenge is maintaining the financial sustainability needed to support future growth. Cancer programs must continue investing in innovation, broadening care delivery, recruiting, and retaining specialized staff, and preparing for growing demand, all while navigating reimbursement pressures, margin compression, and increasing scrutiny around performance.
Those concerns were reflected in a recent survey of U.S. oncology stakeholders, where 76% of respondents identified “keeping up with advances in oncology financially” as a challenge, followed by “hiring enough staff” (72%) and “workflow and operational efficiency” (66%).
Access presents another major obstacle for organizations looking to grow, as many communities still face geographic barriers to cancer care. Recent research found that 68.5% of U.S. counties, home to more than 50 million people, lacked a radiation oncology practice site in 2025.
At the same time, existing cancer programs are preparing for significant growth in demand. Annual cancer diagnoses worldwide are projected to increase from approximately 20 million cases in 2022 to 35 million by 2050, while the number of patients requiring radiotherapy is expected to grow from 10 million to 16.5 million during the same period.
These financial, operational, workforce, and access challenges are reshaping expectations for healthcare investments. Healthcare leaders increasingly need new approaches to implementation that connect their investments more directly to meaningful organizational outcomes. At the same time, they are looking for ways to create greater continuity across the cancer care journey, ensuring that clinical decisions, operational processes, and care delivery remain aligned from diagnosis through treatment and follow-up.
A more strategic approach to implementation
Traditional implementation models typically follow a familiar path: assess needs, configure systems, train staff, go-live, and transition responsibility to the organization. Success is often measured at deployment. Was the project delivered on time? Did users complete training? Was the budget maintained?
Those milestones remain important, but they don’t necessarily indicate whether an organization is realizing the full value of its investments or whether those investments are creating a more connected experience across the patient journey.
Adaptive partnership models can provide the guidance, expertise, and discipline needed to pursue these objectives before the first piece of technology is physically installed. This includes helping organizations think beyond individual technology deployments and toward how imaging, clinical insights, and therapy can work together to support care delivery and patient outcomes over time.
What is an adaptive partnership model?
At the core of all adaptive partnerships is a repeatable, flexible framework that guides organizational investments to broader ambitions while enhancing visibility into performance and progress.
The process typically begins with a comprehensive assessment of organizational priorities, operational performance, workforce considerations, infrastructure needs, and opportunities for growth. Based on this understanding, healthcare leaders and their partners establish a shared roadmap that prioritizes initiatives, coordinates resources, and defines success measures around organizational needs.
While implementation remains an important component of the process, it represents only one phase of a longer journey.
After installation, performance is continuously reviewed against agreed success measures, informing areas for refinement, adaptation, and improved outcomes. This ongoing visibility can help organizations better connect insights generated across the care pathway and translate them into continuous improvements for patients, clinicians, and operations.
Adaptive partnerships focus on five interconnected areas of value:
- Patient experience: Strengthening coordination, communication, continuity of care, and overall patient satisfaction, while helping patients navigate a more connected experience from detection through survivorship.
- Financial goals: Supporting economic resilience, return on investment, and future program development.
- Access: Expanding care delivery capabilities, extending services into underserved communities, and increasing access to specialized cancer care.
- Operational performance: Improving workflow efficiency, throughput, system utilization, and technology adoption with better connectivity between care teams, information, and treatment processes.
- Workforce support: Reducing burden, supporting training and development, and helping care teams work more effectively.
Why adaptive partnerships matter
Whether the goal is to expand capacity, support program viability, or extend services to communities with limited access, success requires coordination across clinical, operational, technical, and administrative functions.
Adaptive partnerships bring together the expertise needed to support that effort. Flexing to the organization's priorities, this can include strategic advisors, clinical experts, physicists, dosimetrists, workflow specialists, technology experts, data analysts, and program leaders who work intimately alongside healthcare organizations.
These experts help evaluate opportunities, create actionable implementation plans, guide decision-making, apply industry best practices, and navigate the operational realities that often emerge as transformation efforts move forward.
Efforts include:
- Supporting decision-making across clinical, operational, workforce, access, and economic priorities
- Developing long-term visions for growth and capability expansion
- Implementing new technologies, workflows, and service models
- Defining success indicators and monitor advancement
- Addressing emerging barriers and adapt to changing circumstances
- Supporting large-scale initiatives across distributed networks, multiple sites, or geographically underserved regions
Through Cancer Care programmatic services at Siemens Healthineers — a leader in adaptive implementation partnerships — this collaborative approach provides top healthcare organizations around the globe with access to specialized expertise that can be difficult to build and maintain internally, including Nova Scotia Health, Ballad Health, and Princess Margaret Cancer Centre.
Their experiences demonstrate the value of having dedicated teams focused on performance measurement, analysis, and program optimization as part of the partnership. By creating greater visibility across care processes and outcomes, organizations can make more informed decisions that strengthen connections between diagnosis, treatment planning, therapy delivery, and long-term program performance.
Beyond the investment
More than ever, healthcare leaders are focusing on how their investments support meaningful humanist care, while upholding growth, strengthening care delivery, and positioning their organizations to meet future needs in a sustainable manner.
Technological innovation remains an important part of that equation. Yet lasting success increasingly requires the ability to bring together strategy, expertise, operational excellence, and innovation in ways that address both organizational priorities and patient care.
As cancer care continues to evolve, the organizations best positioned for success will be those that approach their transformation to a truly connected patient journey as an ongoing discipline rather than a one-time initiative.
Learn more about Advanced Oncology Solutions.
- Data from a closed double-blinded survey of n=100 oncology stakeholders conducted in the USA. Titles included CEOs, CMOs, COOs, Director of Radiation Oncology, Director of Oncology, Physician Owners, Radiation Oncologists, Medical Physicists, Medical/Clinical Oncologists, and Surgical Oncologists.
- Catherine Yu, Sifan Grace Lu, Danielle Arons, Jared P. Rowley, Kunal K. Sindhu, Structural Vulnerability in the United States Radiation Oncology Delivery System: Predictors and Consequences of Practice Site Disappearance, International Journal of Radiation Oncology – Biology - Physics, 2026, ISSN 0360-3016.
- Bray F, Laversanne M, Sung H, Ferlay J, Siegel RL, Soerjomataram I, Jemal A. Global cancer statistics 2022: GLOBOCAN estimates of incidence and mortality worldwide for 36 cancers in 185 countries. CA Cancer J Clin. 2024 May-Jun;74(3):229-263. doi: 10.3322/caac.21834. Epub 2024 Apr 4. PMID: 38572751.
- Zhu H, Chua M, Chitapanarux I et al. Global radiotherapy demands and corresponding radiotherapy-professional workforce requirements in 2022 and predicted to 2050: a population-based study. The Lancet Global Health, 2024; 12, e1945-e1953
