Redefining innovation in healthcare: a path to greater empathy and impact in cancer care

The term "innovation" has become a buzzword, all too often referring to catchy but shallow initiatives. The essence of true innovation is not just about pursuing new ideas, but also leading to impact at scale.

Over the course of my career, I’ve identified three criteria for any initiative that my team takes on. First, the initiative must solve a problem at the intersection of our consumers’ or care providers’ needs and our organization’s strategic priorities. Second, the initiative must represent a compelling and quantified opportunity for impact. Third, the initiative must involve close collaboration and partnership with the business to execute one of its critical priorities.

With cancer being the second-leading cause of death in the U.S. , oncology and cancer care tops each of those three criteria, with the most pressing need to advance cancer detection, prevention, and treatment. By combining our innovative approach, secure health data platform, and expertise in serving members at every life stage, Carelon is uniquely positioned to make a significant impact in the fight against cancer.

 

Focusing on the right problems to solve

Early in my career, I heard a phrase that has stayed with me ever since. “Your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant.” To me, that means that it doesn’t really matter what we think, as innovators. What matters is solving challenges that meet our stakeholders’ needs.

With oncology and cancer care, like all our priority initiatives within my Innovation team, we start by leading with empathy — leveraging human-centered design to understand the drivers of the problem and what we need to do to address it.

Our dedicated team is committed to connecting with the end user, whether that’s our members, care providers, or others, to understand their needs and test the solutions and concepts we develop. Then, and only then, we focus on driving scale.

Harnessing data for transformative innovation

As part of one of the nation’s largest healthcare payers, Carelon has vast pools of data. This presents both an opportunity and an obligation to harness the power of that data responsibly. We’re duty-bound to maximize the potential of our data to identify, understand, and solve some of the biggest problems in healthcare, including the 1.9M cancer diagnoses each year in the United States , according to the American Cancer Society.

A cornerstone of this vision is our innovative Digital Data Sandbox, a secure collaboration platform that fundamentally changes how we approach healthcare challenges. With over a billion certified healthcare claims, this sandbox serves as a fertile ground for developing and evaluating AI and machine-learning tools, alongside other digital solutions.

The Digital Data Sandbox is also a beacon for collaborative innovation. It fosters partnerships across the healthcare ecosystem, encouraging shared exploration and problem solving, and exemplifies Carelon’s ethos that innovation thrives through collaboration. More than a repository of data, it's a dynamic space where ideas are nurtured and solutions are cultivated, always with an unwavering focus on improving patient outcomes and enhancing the healthcare experience.
 

New collaborations in the fight against cancer

One example of Carelon’s commitment to the fight against cancer is our participation in the CancerX program . Part of the federal government’s Cancer Moonshot initiative, CancerX exemplifies a multifaceted approach to tackling the complexities of cancer care. It's a public–private collaboration that unites diverse stakeholders within the healthcare ecosystem, including health plans, care providers, policymakers, and pharmaceutical companies to boost innovation in the fight against cancer.

As a steering committee member for CancerX, my role is to contribute leadership and ideas and collaborate with other leading companies to set priorities and practices that will help realize a future free of the burden of cancer.

Carelon brings a unique perspective to this collaborative effort. Representing a significant segment of healthcare stakeholders, we’re able to introduce cutting-edge solutions tailored to meet consumers' needs throughout their healthcare journeys. The emphasis on scale and real impact is central to our participation, focusing on solutions that tangibly improve patients' lives. The payer perspective also adds valuable insights on access and equity in developing innovative solutions.

We have a strong understanding of what it takes to deploy solutions across the diverse needs of the people we serve. Serving members at every life stage, across Medicare, Medicaid, and the commercial exchange, we understand that creating scalable solutions requires awareness of real consumer needs. Bringing real-world, deidentified data to the table is a major asset for ideation, prototyping, and testing.

The future of oncology will include linking treatment to genomic data and personalizing therapy at the molecular level. Data and AI-powered analytics will drive new breakthroughs in drug discovery and individualized treatments. They will also help us better understand racial and socioeconomic disparities in standards of care, access to clinical trials, and experimental treatments so we can make cancer care more equitable.

 

Making digital solutions more available

An obvious hurdle to making healthcare more equitable in the digital age is that many Americans lack access to smartphones, computers, or high-speed internet . To ensure maximum impact, digital solutions need to be more accessible and available. Carelon’s Get Connected for Health Program addresses this challenge, as the initiative enables at-risk members to access virtual care and digital health tools through high-quality smartphones.

The provided smartphones come with unlimited data and are preloaded with an interface that makes it easy to access digital health services. This program will greatly benefit members in need, whether they have cancer or another chronic condition that requires ongoing care and monitoring.

 

Innovation that impacts lives

With our commitment to deploying our data, technology, and resources to serve the needs of our stakeholders, we are developing solutions that fight diseases like cancer as well as enhance our patients’ lives.

In the context of cancer care, this means developing treatments that not only extend life but also improve the quality of those additional years. We want to ensure that every patient, regardless of background or circumstance, can access the best care possible — backed by the latest precision medicine, supportive care, and virtual or digital health tools.

Ultimately, innovation in healthcare will need to extend beyond technology and data. It’s about reshaping the landscape to be more empathetic, equitable, and patient centered.

This continued positive evolution will require collaboration across the entire healthcare ecosystem. I see this spirit of collaboration and innovation in my work in the corporate world as well as with the graduate students I teach at UCLA in my class, “The Business of Healthcare.” I’m continually inspired by both my colleagues’ and students’ energy, insight, and capacity, as well as their hunger to focus relentlessly on innovation that truly matters — innovation that changes lives.