The People behind Healthcare Innovation: Interview with Sue Henshall, CEO of the City Cancer Challenge Foundation

As part of my work, I have the privilege of speaking with many inspiring innovators. Although the business community usually focuses on companies, pitches, and valuations — and less on the innovator — I thought it would be interesting to learn a bit more about the people behind healthcare innovation. In this series, I'm sharing some of my conversations with innovators in a condensed format, focusing on their experience, their opinions, and their learnings.

This latest conversation is with Sue Henshall, CEO of City Cancer Challenge Foundation (C/Can), which builds community-led cancer care solutions from the ground up.

Tobias: What’s your story and how did you become an innovator in healthcare?

Sue: I started out as a cancer researcher at a time when the use of high-throughput technologies to assess thousands of genes was just becoming a reality. The full potential of personalized medicine was not yet understood, but advances in genomics were delivering early wins with some targeted cancer therapies. My lab started working with a start-up in San Francisco that had pioneered these technologies to generate insights that would help to predict if an individual’s cancer might progress and its likely response to these drugs. While access to the technologies enabled the research, it was the collective expertise of the people around the table that was driving the discoveries—surgeons, oncologists, nurse coordinators, pathologists, data and basic scientists working together to create a bench-to-bedside continuum.

It was clear that this extraordinary convergence of data, technology, and medicine was the path to future innovation for patient care. Yet the reach of this innovation was still limited and my mentor urged me to step out of my comfort zone and get a real-world view of cancer care. I decided to spend time in Geneva at the Union for International Cancer Control where I thought I would be teaching people about cancer biology. It proved to be a crossroads.

The first reality check was that 65 percent of cancer deaths are happening in the least developed parts of the world. Access to proven life-saving treatments are limited and targeted therapies are mostly out of reach. I learned so much in eight transformative weeks that, in the end, I never went back to the lab. It was the start of a new journey and an opportunity to apply my training in a different way, bringing together people with diverse perspectives and experiences in a shared purpose to move the needle on access to care.

Every day with C/Can, I have the enormous privilege of working with a community of people in the public and private sectors, who have a collective commitment to transforming the way cancer solutions are designed, planned, and implemented in their cities. C/Can’s role as a catalyst is to support innovation across the local health system and embed new ways of thinking and partnering to strengthen their efforts. At its core it’s a partnership initiative, bringing together the right people with the right skills to support long-term systemic change.

Tobias: Where do you see cancer care at city level moving to in the next ten years?

Sue: We can already see a role for cities as an ideal entry point to challenge ideas and test new ways of thinking, partnering and working in urban planning, climate, transport, and now health-service delivery. This next decade will see cities use their attributes as complex, adaptive health systems to champion patient-centered cancer care by creating better synergies between all stakeholders as equal partners—patients, universities, hospitals, civil society, and governments—in order to deliver context-specific solutions that respond to patients’ needs.

This July in Colombia, for example, the Secretary of Health of Valle del Cauca, the Secretary of Health of Cali, and the city of Cali’s leading hospitals and insurance agencies signed a collaboration agreement for the first time. This implemented management guidelines for the city’s prioritized cancers, providing a common language to help the different institutions and disciplines communicate and collaborate more effectively, which ultimately supports the continuity of patient care in the city.

Tobias: Looking more broadly, what are the biggest opportunities and obstacles you see for innovation in the healthcare environment?

Sue: The biggest obstacles to innovation are inadequately resourced and fragmented health systems. Funding for cancer and other non-communicable diseases (NCDs)—the cause of 70 percent of all global deaths annually—continues to lag behind all other health issues: less than 2 percent of total global development assistance for health goes to NCDs. Cross-sector financing solutions offer an opportunity to address the global need. Whether through direct investment, technical assistance, or convening efforts, all must contribute to achieve decisive and lasting impact. This includes tapping private investment through partnerships.

Building bridges through knowledge exchange and alignment of interests among parallel and independent healthcare systems, both public and private, is also critical to addressing widespread fragmentation of cancer care—a critical factor in timely and accurate treatment and better outcomes.

In Ghana, local cross-sector collaboration has been a unifying force for the city of Kumasi in developing radiotherapy services. For the first time, with support from C/Can, a city-wide radiotherapy project is helping to mobilize local and national key actors to deliver a quality-assurance program, and to develop radiotherapy services for the city’s hospitals that meet patient needs. The project includes participation and consultation with the Ashanti Regional Coordinating Council, the Ministry of Health, the city’s public, private, and university hospitals, as well as local and national NGOs, the Ghana Medical Association, Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, Ghana Society of Medical Physicists, and Nuclear Regulatory Authority.

Tobias: When you look at the health system as a whole (providers, payers, doctors, patients) who do you see driving innovation the most? 

Sue: The strength of civil society is often a barometer for health-systems innovation. Local civil society organizations, most often led by patient advocates, are frequently the first to highlight gaps, and the first to seek to connect with others to push for local solutions. In countries with strong civil society such as Brazil, these organizations have been instrumental in lobbying for the adoption of legislation, including the national mammography law and the “60-days law” (the maximum time from a cancer diagnosis to treatment). Conversely, our experience is that, in countries where civil society is not well integrated with other sectors, health systems’ readiness for change is lower overall.

Some of the biggest wins come from alignment of interest among all parties. In Paraguay, for example, strong leadership from the bipartisan City Executive Committee (convened by C/Can), together with targeted communications, saw the first national cancer law adopted under the new government’s leadership in 2018.

Tobias: In your opinion, what is the single most important change that will better enable digital transformation in health systems?

Sue: Responsible data sharing across a healthcare system is needed both to underpin digital transformation and also to ensure the needs of the end-user—the patient—are met. Breaking down data silos so that healthcare professionals can share patient information, allowing them to provide timely and accurate clinical decisions, reduce duplication of efforts, and help patients navigate the cancer care system more easily, is critical.

As an example, Kigali in Rwanda has struggled with a lack of connectedness among the different health information systems across the city. As a result, patient data are often disjointed and incomplete, undermining efficient delivery of quality cancer care services for the close to 1,000 cancer patients living in the city. To improve information exchange, city leaders led by Rwanda Biomedical Centre are working on several fronts to harmonize the way information is being reported, and are also setting up new information systems that can work together to ensure data connectivity. Importantly, Kigali is championing an approach that supports communication, sharing, and exchange so that vital data are not held in a vacuum but can be used for the optimal benefit of patients.

Tobias: What do you know now that you wish you had known when you were starting out as an innovator and entrepreneur - and what would you like to learn more about?

Sue: Get comfortable with making mistakes and then move on. I was once told by a colleague that it was a sign of weakness to admit my errors and my credibility was at risk. However, everything I’ve experienced since then, and all the successful innovators I know and have read about, have come to terms with failing fast and taking on lessons learned to become better leaders.

Predictive analytics have evolved rapidly over the past decade. If I had the opportunity, I would learn more about how to apply today’s tools to build health-system resilience by supporting cities to plan for their future health workforce, technologies, and infrastructure needs based on the data they are capturing today.

For more information, see Sue Henshall and City Cancer Challenge Foundation. 

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and his guest contributor and do not reflect the views of McKinsey & Company.