By Chet Hilton, SVP and GM, Specialty Networks Solutions
Drug development is advancing at an increasingly rapid pace, delivering breakthrough therapies that address unmet needs across a vast array of patients. This is great news for patients, but can their providers keep up?
In 2024 alone, manufacturers launched more than 60 new oncology therapies in the United States, according to the American Association for Cancer Research. Many of those treatments are genome-specific, targeting very distinct proteins that are specific to the DNA of a patient. These therapies are life-changing, increasingly effective, and designed for smaller, highly specific patient populations. While most of these treatments are developed in partnership with academic medical centers, roughly 85% of cancer patients are treated by community providers, according to the ACCC Community Oncology Research Institute, pointing to the critical need to collaborate and share knowledge among community practices to increase awareness of and access to these innovative, advanced therapies for their patients.
Access to high-quality care should never be determined by geography. Whether a patient receives treatment at a major academic medical center or in a community practice closer to home, they deserve the best care possible. By connecting clinicians with insights, resources and digital capabilities, we help empower them to make more confident decisions and deliver personalized care.
Closing the gap between rapid innovation and optimal patient care is one of the most important challenges facing healthcare today and Specialty Networks Solutions is focused on a solution. Using our decade of experience and driving transformative change through technology, we use our scale and our trusted partnerships with providers to help deliver actionable insights at the point of care.
Augmenting clinical expertise with actionable AI
As physicians navigate an increasingly complex healthcare landscape, innovation is critical to helping them succeed. AI has the power to harness the vast array of patient data, and combined with the most up-to-date clinical evidence, can support a community physician’s independent clinical judgment in selecting appropriate therapy for a patient. Further, our use of AI helps structure complicated lab and pathology data allowing results to be easily interpreted, lowering the burden for physicians to find relevant information seamlessly. Patients can benefit when clinicians have access to insights from broader treatment experiences, including aggregated, de-identified outcomes and learnings from patients with similar conditions or disease states beyond their own practices. We are striving to deliver actionable insights that support informed decisions by helping clinicians better understand real-world treatment pathways and emerging therapies, with treatment decisions always remaining with the patient and their physician.
Expanding clinical research and real-world evidence (RWE)
For patients, participation in clinical trials can often be limited by location or lack of awareness. Strengthening connections between community providers and research opportunities can help broaden participation, improve representation and bring innovative therapies closer to the patients who may benefit from them. We recently shared how our team is collaborating on a real-world study focused on the lived experiences of patients with inflammatory bowel disease. Pairing clinical trials with robust RWE capabilities can help capture how treatments perform in everyday community settings, helping biopharma partners and providers alike better understand long-term outcomes across diverse patient populations.
Additionally, technology will continue to play an important role in helping providers navigate complexity. Analytics, office automation, payer automation, as well as clinical support capabilities, can help physicians identify care gaps, improve workflow efficiency and access relevant information when they need it most. The goal is to help providers spend less time managing administrative complexity and more time focused on patient care.
The opportunities ahead
What makes Specialty Networks Solutions unique is not just the scale of our network or the strength of our relationships; it is the opportunity to use those assets to solve challenges that healthcare has struggled to solve for years. Throughout my career, I have seen how meaningful progress happens when organizations come together to align innovation, insights and access around the needs of patients. At Cardinal Health, our team has the opportunity to be a catalyst for that progress, helping community practices navigate an increasingly complex healthcare landscape which is accelerating the adoption of technology and solutions that improve care.
We have a strong foundation, a clear strategy and a remarkable opportunity ahead of us. The question is no longer whether these possibilities exist. The question is how effectively we execute against them. Our mission is to change the way healthcare is delivered, and we’re passionate about the opportunity to do that every day.
As senior vice president and general manager of Specialty Network Solutions at Cardinal Health, Chet Hilton leads the strategy and operations of a business dedicated to helping specialty providers, biopharma manufacturers and patients navigate an increasingly complex healthcare landscape. He oversees innovative data, analytics, technology and practice support solutions that improve patient access to therapies, enable personalized care and strengthen outcomes across community-based specialty medicine.