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Download the 2026 State of Digital Healthcare in Oncology Centers of Excellence, Chemotherapy and Infusion Networks, and Cancer Centers Report
New from Black Book Research Insights: State of Digital Healthcare in Oncology Centers of Excellence, Chemotherapy and Infusion Networks, and Cancer Centers 2026— a qualitative, buyer-ready market report on the technologies, workflows, operating pressures, and vendor dynamics reshaping digital healthcare across U.S. oncology. This report examines how cancer centers, oncology institutes, hospital-owned infusion networks, community oncology groups, specialty cancer hospitals, and related pathology, genomics, pharmacy, analytics, and research functions are buying and governing technology in one of healthcare’s most operationally demanding segments.
Why this report, why now
Oncology enters 2026 as one of the clearest examples of healthcare shifting from isolated clinical software purchases to a distinct digital operating model. Cancer care now spans inpatient oncology units, specialty hospitals, outpatient departments, community clinics, infusion sites, radiation centers, specialty pharmacy, molecular diagnostics, pathology, and clinical research. As a result, software decisions are increasingly being made around orchestration of the full patient journey rather than documentation alone.
At the same time, the financial, regulatory, and operational pressures in oncology are unusually concentrated. Black Book Research finds that providers are being pushed to improve referral-to-treatment intervals, reduce prior-authorization friction, protect hospital-owned infusion economics, strengthen between-visit monitoring, connect biomarker and pathology intelligence to treatment decisions, and relieve escalating workforce strain across nursing, pharmacy, navigation, access, and revenue-cycle operations.
This is also no longer a market that buys technology as one uniform segment. Inpatient oncology providers are prioritizing acute documentation, medication safety, infection surveillance, malignant hematology and transplant workflows, and continuity back to ambulatory care. Outpatient oncology providers are more intensely focused on referral conversion, financial clearance, infusion throughput, oral oncology adherence, navigation, patient communication, and treatment-readiness visibility. The strongest digital strategies now connect both worlds instead of optimizing one side in isolation.
Two oncology market realities are now decisive
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Oncology is not a generic acute or ambulatory healthcare IT market. It is a service-line ecosystem where access, authorization, infusion operations, specialty pharmacy, pathology, genomics, trial workflow, patient engagement, analytics, and reimbursement all influence whether treatment starts on time and whether patients stay in network.
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Winning increasingly depends on connected workflow, not digital activity alone. Buyers are rewarding technologies and service partners that reduce denied starts, improve infusion-day readiness, operationalize precision medicine, support oral oncology continuity, strengthen navigation and symptom response, and create more usable interoperability across the longitudinal cancer journey.
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Modernization in oncology is now being judged not simply by EHR presence or feature count, but by whether the technology stack improves start-of-care speed, infusion utilization, prior-auth transparency, patient retention, staff productivity, and the ability to turn diagnostics and multimodal data into clinically usable action.
Market signals at a glance
Selected findings and themes in the report underscore the scale and urgency of digital healthcare transformation in oncology:
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The report is based on approximately 1,280 qualified U.S. participants, spanning academic cancer centers, integrated health-system oncology programs, specialty cancer hospitals, hospital-owned cancer centers, community oncology groups, outpatient infusion networks, and radiation or multimodality partner networks.
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Black Book identifies the dominant 2026 operational pain points as referral-to-treatment delay, infusion and treatment-readiness breakdowns, prior authorization and denial friction, between-visit monitoring gaps in oral oncology, and latency across diagnostics, genomics, and trial workflows.
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The report examines sixteen oncology software and service subsets and includes separate analysis of inpatient and outpatient oncology requirements, buying triggers, digital maturity, market gaps, and 2026–2028 outlook dynamics.
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Black Book finds that oncology procurement in 2026 is pragmatic, service-line-led, and intolerant of workflow disruption, with buying decisions increasingly triggered by concrete bottlenecks such as chronic prior-auth backlog, infusion overflow, pathology latency, poor patient communication, and trial-enrollment drag.
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The report concludes that the strategic winners through 2028 will be the organizations that create one oncology operating spine across access, precision medicine, infusion, pharmacy, navigation, research, and reimbursement.