ONCOLOGY
Patient access, built for the operating reality of cancer care.
Every visit in oncology is high-stakes — for the patient, for the chair, for the treatment plan. QLess Health helps oncology practices and cancer centers fill more of them, lose fewer of them, and keep patients connected across the cycle.
Deployed at
City of Hope
An NCI-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte, California — where QLess Health runs across outpatient and infusion services integrated with the Epic environment.
THE OPERATING REALITY
What's actually happening in cancer care.
Oncology runs at the intersection of high-acuity care, constrained capacity, and patient lives that depend on the schedule. The numbers tell the story.
2.1M+
New US cancer diagnoses projected in 2026
The American Cancer Society projects 2,114,850 new cancer cases and 626,140 deaths in 2026 — sustained volume feeding every cancer center, oncology practice, and infusion suite in the country.
Source: American Cancer Society, Cancer Facts & Figures 2026
70%
Median actual chair utilization in oncology infusion centers
Roughly three of every ten chair-hours go unused, even as patients wait days for an open slot. No-shows, same-day cancellations, and treatment-cycle variability all eat into the chair as the constrained asset.
Source: National Hospital Oncology Benchmark (2014), via Infusion Journal (2023)
38
States with fewer oncologists per capita in 2024 than in 2014
ASCO's 2025 workforce report finds oncologist density per 100,000 people aged 55+ dropped from 15.9 to 14.9 nationally; 68% of older Americans live in counties where at least one in four oncologists is nearing retirement. Cancer demand is rising; supply is tightening.
Source: ASCO State of the Hematology and Medical Oncologist Workforce in America, 2025
WHAT YOU'LL SEE
Where the lift comes from.
5–15 pts
Chair utilization lift
Continuity-aware scheduling reduces empty chair-hours without overbooking.
20–40%
No-show reduction
Self-scheduling, smart routing, and patient-channel flexibility close the gap between scheduled and actual visits.
25–50%
Inbound call volume reduction
Patients schedule, reschedule, and check status from their phones — phone-bank time goes back into clinical workflow.
Illustrative ranges from cross-industry queue management work. Outcomes in any specific oncology practice depend on chair count, treatment mix, baseline workflow, and patient demographics. We model your numbers in the working session.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR ONCOLOGY
Where the operational reality lives.
The chair is the constrained asset.Median actual chair utilization in oncology infusion centers sits around 70%, even as patients wait days to begin therapy. No-shows, same-day cancellations, and treatment-cycle variability shrink utilization. Walk-ups, overbooking, and last-minute rebooks try to recapture it. QLess Health's job is to make the schedule reflect what's actually going to happen — fewer surprise empty chairs, fewer overbooked panic days, and more of the chair time the practice is paying for.
Tier-aware reality: oncology isn't one buyer.The 73 NCI-Designated cancer centers run differently from the ~950 community oncology practices, which run differently from the broader 2,600 oncology physician groups. NCI centers operate at academic-medical-center scale on full Epic (or equivalent) with complex clinical trial portfolios. Community oncology runs on OncoEMR, Flatiron, McKesson iKnowMed, and similar specialty stacks. The patient access workflow is different at each tier. QLess Health meets each one where they are.
Treatment plans, not isolated visits.Most oncology visits are one slot in a longer treatment cycle — chemo every three weeks, radiation Monday through Friday for six weeks, immunotherapy on a custom cadence. A no-show isn't just a missed appointment; it's a treatment delay, a cycle interrupted, a clinical conversation that didn't happen. QLess Health's continuity-aware recall and proactive outreach keep the patient connected across the cycle, not just the next slot.
Financial toxicity changes the no-show conversation.The annual patient out-of-pocket and time-cost burden of cancer is approximately $21 billion in the United States, and most oncologists report not feeling equipped to address it. A no-show in oncology is sometimes about the cost of getting there — gas money, missed work, family caregiving. Recall and outreach that surface patients who haven't been seen — without making them feel surveilled — is a structural lever in this population.
A QLESS HEALTH ONCOLOGY CUSTOMER
City of Hope
City of Hope is an NCI-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center based in Duarte, California, with a national clinical research footprint and a regional care network across Southern California. Founded in 1913, it ranks consistently among the top cancer centers in the United States and operates an integrated model of cancer treatment, research, and education across hematologic malignancies, solid tumors, and bone marrow transplant.
QLess Health handles patient access in City of Hope's environment, integrated with the Epic stack the cancer center runs on. The deployment supports the throughput and continuity work that defines an AMC-tier oncology operation.
Read the full case study →INTEGRATIONS
Connected where the EHR work happens.
QLess Health today integrates with major healthcare EHR environments, including the full Epic environments that large NCI-Designated cancer centers run on — like City of Hope. Named oncology-specific systems — OncoEMR, Flatiron, Epic Beacon, McKesson iKnowMed — are on the integration roadmap.
For oncology practices on those systems today, the platform speaks standard healthcare interfaces (HL7, FHIR), and most deployments don't require a custom oncology integration to start.
READY TO MODEL YOUR NUMBERS?
Let's see what this looks like for your practice.
Bring your visit volume, chair count, and current utilization. We'll bring the math.
Sources
- American Cancer Society, Cancer Facts & Figures 2026.
- National Hospital Oncology Benchmark (2014), as cited in Infusion Journal — "Development of Productivity Standards for Ambulatory Infusion Services" (Nov/Dec 2023). — Infusion Journal
- American Society of Clinical Oncology, "The State of the Hematology and Medical Oncologist Workforce in America," JCO Oncology Practice (October 2025). — ASCO 2025
- Yabroff KR, et al., "Annual patient economic burden of cancer in the United States," JNCI (2021), as cited in MASCC 2025 plenary on financial toxicity.
- Black Book Research, 2026 State of Digital Healthcare in Oncology Report (April 2026).