Last week, our team attended the Association of Cancer Executives (ACE) Annual Meeting and returned with a renewed sense of purpose.
Each year, the conference offers cancer center leaders a rare opportunity to step back from day-to-day demands and reflect on the shared challenges shaping cancer care today.
Across organizations, leaders are focused on improving access to care, reducing friction in care coordination, and supporting clinical teams stretched thin by administrative complexity. Yet one persistent issue continues to quietly slow progress: getting the right patient records, at the right time, and in a form clinicians can actually use.
Through our work with 40 percent of the nation’s top 50 cancer hospitals, as recognized by U.S. News & World Report, eHealth Technologies sees these challenges play out every day. Across organizations of all sizes, the same issues surface repeatedly—delays tied to incomplete records, disconnected systems, and the difficulty of getting clinicians the information they need, when they need it.
The hidden delays before the first appointment
For patients referred for oncology care, the clock starts ticking long before they ever see a specialist. Appointments often depend on the availability of prior records—clinical notes, operative reports, imaging, pathology slides, and test results that may live across multiple organizations.
In many cases, these records must be requested manually, followed up on repeatedly, and pieced together from disparate sources. Intake teams may lack clinical context. Systems don’t talk to each other. Images arrive on CDs. Pathology slides take weeks. And clinicians are left waiting—or preparing for visits without full information.
The result is familiar to many cancer centers: delayed scheduling, inefficient first visits, repeat testing, and frustration for both patients and care teams.
Why oncology records are uniquely complex
Cancer care is data-intensive by nature. Patients often have extensive prior histories across community hospitals, imaging centers, and specialty practices. Not all records are equally relevant, yet missing a key pathology report or imaging study can impact a treatment decision.
Simply collecting records isn’t enough. Clinicians need them to be timely, organized, clinically relevant, and specialty-ready—including images and pathology slides—so they can make confident decisions without unnecessary delays.
This challenge surfaced repeatedly in ACE conversations, especially as cancer centers expand networks, increase referral volumes, and care for patients across broader geographies.
Moving from collection to clinical readiness
Addressing this problem requires more than additional staff or incremental process changes. It requires rethinking how patient records are collected, organized, and delivered into clinical workflows.
As a partner to cancer centers, our role is not to replace existing systems, but to help close the gaps between them—ensuring records move efficiently across organizations and into the EHR systems clinicians already use.
By focusing on interoperability and EHR integration, cancer centers can reduce the manual effort involved in chasing records and improve consistency in what clinicians receive before a visit. Just as important, records are organized in ways that align with oncology workflows and decision-making.
Why the right records matter
Cancer care also demands precision in what records are collected—not just how quickly they arrive. eHealth Technologies works closely with clinical teams to define record requirements aligned to each cancer type and stage. This clinical input helps ensure care teams receive the records that matter most, whether that includes operative reports, associated pathology, tumor markers, genetic testing, or supporting imaging—so clinicians can spend less time searching for information and more time making informed treatment decisions.
Reducing burden where it matters most
When records arrive late, incomplete, or disorganized, the burden falls on everyone—clinicians, staff, and patients alike. When records arrive ready for use, the impact is immediate: appointments are more productive, decisions are made sooner, and patients spend less time waiting in uncertainty.
As cancer centers continue to look for ways to improve access, efficiency, and experience, making patient data more accessible, connected, and actionable remains one of the most practical—and impactful—places to start.
A shared priority across cancer care
The conversations at ACE made one thing clear: advancing cancer care isn’t just about innovation in treatment. It’s also about improving the operational foundations that support every clinical decision.
Ensuring patient records are timely, organized, clinically relevant, and specialty-ready may not always be visible to patients—but it plays a critical role in helping them move from referral, to evaluation, to treatment without unnecessary delay.
At eHealth Technologies, we’re proud to support cancer centers in this work—quietly, behind the scenes—helping accelerate time to treatment by enabling timely, meaningful first appointments. In fact, organizations using our solutions have seen up to a 30% reduction in referral-to-visit time, so clinicians can focus on what matters most: caring for patients when they need it most.
Learn more about eHealth Connect®
eHealth Connect® is helping cancer centers access complete, organized, and specialty-ready patient records—including imaging and pathology slides—so your teams can reduce delays, improve first visits, and focus on delivering care.