Inside the 2025 Community Oncology Report: Pressures and Priorities Facing Practices

Community oncology plays a central role in the US health care system, offering high-quality care that is both accessible and cost-effective. However, with its critical role comes increasing responsibility to meet growing patient needs and evolving treatment demands.

The latest 2025 Advancing Community Oncology Report by McKesson reveals the mounting pressures currently facing community-based providers. Drawing on insights from providers across the country, the report highlights barriers to clinical trial participation, inequities in access to novel treatments, and workforce shortages that strain already complex practice operations.¹

In an interview with Targeted Oncology, Jason Hammonds, president of Oncology & Multispecialty at McKesson, outlined what it will take to sustain this vital model in an era of accelerating innovation, identified opportunities to overcome these hurdles, and explored how community oncology can thrive through innovation, partnership, and technology-enabled transformation.

Targeted Oncology: In the report, you state that community oncology is key to building a “sustainable future” for cancer care. Beyond proximity, how does the community care model contribute to sustainability at the health system level?

Jason Hammonds: As you [mentioned], proximity matters, because it allows patients to get the high-quality cancer care they deserve close to home and also close to their support network, which we all know is very critical, but the sustainability does go a lot deeper and broader than that. First, it's very well documented that community oncology offers equivalent outcomes as you see in other settings, but at a meaningfully lower cost to the system. And if we're serious about bending the cost curve in cancer care, a thriving community oncology sector isn't optional, it's essential.

The beauty of community care is that it really checks every box. It delivers on every priority of exceptional care, better patient experience, and a meaningful reduction in financial burden for patients, payers, and the entire healthcare system.

Extending beyond that… community practices help expand the system capacity. Cancer incidence continues to grow, therapies become more complex, and we need more points of access, not fewer. The American Cancer Society recently highlighted the great progress in the 5-year survival rate, so it's not just in treating new cancer—it's also helping to support patients through their survivorship. Community practices help to increase capacity across the system and allow clinicians to really practice in an environment where they can focus on patients, innovation, and work efficiently.

The exciting thing for us, too, is [that] biopharma innovation is increasingly happening in the community setting. We see it in the next generation of therapies today, whether it's bispecifics, radiopharmaceuticals, or even cell and gene therapies. And it's where patients are… where access is strongest and scalability is possible. When you distill all that down… a sustainable future for cancer care really depends on community oncology thriving. You simply can't solve all of the challenges we highlight without a well-supported community oncology sector, which, from our perspective, is really the backbone of cancer care.

Looking ahead, what do you see as the most important or necessary changes on the horizon for community oncology over the next 5 years, and how should practices prepare?

I think it's multifaceted, but one I would start with [is] technology. I think it's becoming more foundational. Practices have to prepare for greater alliance, whether it's biomarker testing, data integration, workflow, or supported technology, to manage the rising complexity and ensure patients have advanced care.With this advancement comes more complexity, and I believe technology and [artificial intelligence; AI] is going to be profound in helping to solve that—not just reducing the administrative burden and improving back office services, but also helping to streamline and improve clinical workflows.

I think we're going to see a shift in [clinical trials into] the community. The community is prepared to do it. They're excited about it. It's going to require more partnership to help lower some of these barriers and challenges, but I think the [biopharma] industry recognizes that and is going to work to help create more community-based trial infrastructure to ensure equitable access, particularly as novel and precision therapies accelerate. I think innovation’s outpacing capacity in certain cases; clinical trials are going to have to navigate the operational complexity and be able to adopt to these new therapies quickly, and that means investing in people, processes, and technologies to streamline care delivery. It's going to require, I think, coming at this from all angles to make sure that everybody's prepared for it.

I also think preparing for these new therapies requires early alignment. A key theme of the report is… ensur[ing] a great partnership between providers and biopharma so [they’re] at the table together. As these complex treatments and precision medicines emerge, practices have that partnership that can give the insight, biopharma can do the same, and we all have the resources that help them implement these breakthrough therapies close to home at the outset, not after the fact and trying to retrofit it.

The final thing I would say, and probably the most exciting from my perspective is, the model of care is shifting. I think we've seen this gravitation back into the community. People see the incredible care, the great work being done by practices, and I think their role is going to continue to deepen further, not only because it's the better care setting in many cases, but also, as cancer becomes a more chronic condition that requires long-term, continuous management, practices are going to be able to maintain those close patient relationships and deliver increasing sophistication on site for their patients.

REFERENCES

1. Advancing Community Oncology Report. McKesson Corporation. 2025. Accessed January 28, 2026. https://tinyurl.com/ypkhy837