The Journal of Clinical Pathways spoke with Julia Morton, senior vice president and general manager at Flatiron Health, at the 2024 Community Oncology Conference about how recent developments in technology have impacted point-of-care solutions in community oncology.

Please share your name, title, and an overview of your professional history.

My name is Julia Morton. I lead our health care business at Flatiron Health, which serves all of the products and services that we offer to community oncology.

Can you briefly speak about your role at Flatiron Health?

I'm a lifer at Flatiron. I've been here for almost 9 years, and this is the group of customers that I have worked with for most of that time. They are really close to my heart.

I started at Flatiron developing the customer experience that we wanted this set of individuals to have. And then over time I’ve had a variety of roles. Now I get a chance to run the business and figure out what technology and services we want to offer to this set of practices to ideally help them to deliver great patient care, have a fantastic practice experience, be really successful, and have longevity in the marketplace, which is something we see as being critically important for the care of people with cancer.

The work that I do now is manage across our functions at Flatiron to deliver high-quality technology to be used at the point of care. Our vision is that technology is an asset to the clinicians that are treating people with cancer, and it is something that is enabling them to spend more time with those patients.

All of us have experienced a doctor's appointment where you're trying to communicate with your clinician, and they are clacking away at a keyboard and they're having to do all of this intensely administrative work. Think of that in the context of the experience of a person with cancer and how crucially important that person-to-person connection is.

When I think about the technology and services that we can offer, if we can facilitate clinicians spending more time with their patients and have practices feel that they have a better ability to serve the patients that they treat, that for me is really, really exciting. I manage—across our functions—product engineering, our customer-facing functions, operations, and our sales and marketing to make sure that we're doing as good of a job that as we possibly can.

What sessions stood out to you at this year’s Community Oncology Conference?

There are so many exciting sessions that are on the agenda. We are now at the end of the day, Thursday, so there are some that I'm really excited for tomorrow. One is about health equity and social determinants of health that Dr McAneny is going to be speaking on, which I'm excited to see. Also, there is a session about reimbursement that Dr Vacirca and Kathy Oubre are going to be in. They are all fantastic speakers, and I think they always have really thoughtful reflections on how community oncology can work together to deliver great outcomes, even when times are difficult and when there are challenges that face practices in the space. Just over the course of the day, there have been so many great sessions.

I sat in the artificial intelligence (AI) session that Alti Rahman facilitated with Drs Chen and Doddamani, which I thought was really insightful and gave me a lot of great ideas that I'm excited to bring back to our team. There were also some great sessions earlier today about the relationships between hospitals and community oncology—something that is always a really fruitful topic of debate—that Dr Vacirca and Jeff Hunnicutt were part of. It was super exciting to see some of the new reflections and some of the glimmers of hope in that space. I think we hear about that space really often as an area of challenge for practices. I think what was exciting about listening to that session were some of the real breakthroughs that folks in that space have been able to have by orienting themselves around patient needs and patient experience, and how there can be these somewhat fraught but sometimes successful partnerships in the context of multiple sites of care. I think that was really promising from the mindset of someone who believes that community oncology has such a critical role to play in the long-term treatment of people with cancer and who wants to do everything I can with our company to facilitate longevity of that particular side of care and type of care. That to me seems very promising that that collaboration can be there.

How do you think the sessions at this year’s Community Oncology Conference might impact the development of point-of-care solutions?

I love the theme of this year's conference. The theme of this year's conference, of course, is stronger together. As the Community Oncology Alliance (COA) board was developing the theme, I think what they probably meant was practices [are] stronger together, and that completely resonated with me. COA's opportunity to bring together practices and drive really strong advocacy, knowledge, and the community oncology point of view in a way that is really cohesive and visible is really, really powerful.

The other way that I think about it is all the different stakeholders being together in this space. Obviously, all of folks from practice are here. We have clinicians, we have administrators, we have individuals who are involved in billing, those who are involved in working directly with patients. There are so many complex aspects of how an independent practice that treats people with cancer is set up. The other folks who are here are folks who are involved in developing new therapies. There are technologists here. There are folks who focus on advancing the legislative agenda of this community. I think one of the things that is really powerful about that is you get this really unique alchemy of all these people together learning about [these topics].

From my perspective, I'm really interested in how technology can solve the most pressing problems that this group of individuals have. When I want to learn about that day to day, I make a phone call to one of our practices or maybe I travel to one of our practices. This is one of those incredibly unique opportunities where I get to see so many individuals who are using technology at the point of care in one place, and we have the ability to bounce new ideas around and potentially think of new ways to work together and solve problems. I think that is uniquely powerful.

I'm particularly excited about some of the opportunities that we have to implement new technologies like AI at the point of care, which will ideally help to enhance the quality and amount of time that clinicians have to spend directly with patients. We have technology that's going to intervene smartly to surface key information to them to synthesize information or work with them on clinical documentation, which is a place where clinicians spend so much of their time when they could be sitting face to face with a person who is going through perhaps the hardest thing that they will ever go through in their life. And so, I'm super excited about the opportunity to get into the nitty gritty of this is a great idea, but how does it actually work in practice? How do we get all of the relevant stakeholders in a room and think about the way in which it can actually be deployed at that really critical moment that a clinician is talking to a patient?

Looking ahead, what trends or new developments in oncology care are you most excited for in 2024?

There are a lot. Coming back to this idea of sort of smart technology, and maybe I'll expand from just AI to machine learning (ML) and methods of ingesting large quantities of data. One of the things that I reflect on a lot as a person who works on technology that is deployed at the point of care is that technology has had so many big promises to this particular community of people. We think of the advent of electronic health records (EHRs), for example, and the fact that in the late aughts/early teens a lot of the promise of EHRs was that it was going to dramatically simplify life and be so much better than paper. You were going to have all the knowledge that you need at your fingertips and your life is going to transform in really positive ways.

If we take a critical eye to that, you can reasonably say that EHRs have not delivered yet on a lot of the promises that were made to folks treating people with cancer. Now when I see these technologies that ideally ingest a lot of the complexity that exists in terms of information around a cancer patient, I think of all the things that are salient for a cancer patient in terms of histories that may be incredibly complex, risk factors, and there's an enormous list of things that could be relevant. I also think of technology's ability to ingest all of that data, deliver meaningful insights, and again, really enrich the quality of that person-to-person interaction that a person with cancer is having when they meet front desk staff, when they meet with nurses in the practice, and when they make important decisions about their treatment and have discussions with their physician and/or their oncologist.

I'm personally most excited that we may be reaching a rate shift in how quickly the quality of those technology solutions are able to deliver superior quality of life. And I think of that technology being certainly for patients, but I think of it also being for individuals who are actually doing the really hard work of treating patients.

I had a really fun conversation last night with one of the doctors in the Flatiron Network, Dr Sousou, who operates at Hematology-Oncology Associates of Central New York and Syracuse. We were talking about the value of an ambient scribe technology that basically listens in while you have an encounter with a physician and creates a really polished visit note. We think of that as important because your visit note of your physician is sort of your brand on paper. It's important how it looks and the information that it conveys. Dr Sousou was saying, “If I can get even 20 minutes back in the course of a day, that is really material to me,” and I was questioning, what do you do with that 20 minutes? What it creates is this option where you can see more patients.

We know that there is a meaningful shortage of care in some cases for patients with cancer. That is a massive change in the context of how cancer is treated. The other thing that people can do is spend that time with their families. They can invest in changes and operational questions that they want to make at the practice level.

There are all of these deeply smart and intelligent folks who are treating patients in the context of community oncology, and their lives are so busy that they never get a second to zoom out from the day to day to either do something personally for themselves or think about what are some changes that they might want to implement for patients and their practice. The thing that I am personally incredibly excited about that I think is powerful is this idea that this technology could be at a rate change step. And we might be seeing a real change that is positive for our community of clinicians here and the folks they work with at their practices. I'm very excited about that.