A leading National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center had developed a unique and best-in-class supportive care program with proven results in navigating the complex journey beyond the mere clinical treatment aspect of cancer care.  Based on internal analysis, they found that patients receiving supportive care experienced less time in the ICU, shorter overall hospital lengths of stay, and higher self-reported quality of life than those who did not receive the services[ii].

Camber was engaged by this cancer center as they sought to expand access to comprehensive supportive care services across their extended network of clinics and affiliates, including at rural and urban satellite clinics serving diverse and often underserved populations of patients. While serving more patients and caregivers was the goal, equally critical was scaling up the program in a way that preserved the quality of services, patient satisfaction, and equitable access available within the current program offered on their main academic medical center campus. Camber supported leadership in defining the vision, strategy, and plan for scaling up the supportive care program in a way that preserved the integrated and personalized patient experience delivered in-person. 

To achieve this vision, Camber helped develop the concept for a novel technology-enabled model of care that blends high-touch with high-tech in order to sustainably serve a diverse range of patient and caregiver needs. In delivering this project, Camber focused on five key client objectives to ensure successful outcomes:

• A bold and ambitious vision: Development of a model and strategy intended to be impactful at scale, expanding access to supportive care across the client’s network in the near-term, but with potential to help transform cancer care nationally and internationally longer-term. This meant pushing leaders’ thinking and preconceived notions on the “art of the possible” to consider pathways and end points they had not originally considered.
• Deeply anchored in patient needs: Ensuring that the big vision did not lose sight of the small details that make the current patient-centered model unique and so effective.  This meant understanding patient and caregiver needs as well as provider workflows to identify where there were opportunities for efficiencies and economies of scale as well as where customization and human touch is most critical.
• Designed to be sustainable: While the vision is expansive and the unmet needs are great, we also had to design within a current reimbursement environment, technology architecture, and business model that often move at an evolutionary pace.  This meant “riding the rails” of existing infrastructure where possible, and focusing on “building new rails” in terms of workforce, process, and infrastructure only where most critical.
• Designed to evolve: Transformation in healthcare is a process and not an event, and getting a model as complex as supportive care right requires multiple cycles of iteration.  This meant defining KPIs and monitoring tools to provide feedback loops to support ongoing refinement and account for lessons learned and changing conditions.
• Designed to last: The vision of “supportive care everywhere” championed by the client was to not only develop something that differentiated themselves, but also to do so in a way that could become a blueprint for others’ transformation.  This meant building in pathways for the “productization” of core elements of the model over time.

The final strategy was approved, and the client received outside philanthropic funding to accelerate development and implementation of the new model. Implementation is ongoing.

[i] American Cancer Society, Cancer Facts & Figures 2022.

[ii] Internal client study, not peer reviewed or validated.

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Social norms on reproductive health and sexuality, and access to family planning services, are deeply influenced by a society’s history, culture and access to resources. But family planning is also intimate and deeply personal. Women and men make decisions about when to have children as they navigate  their social, emotional and relational lives, and pursue opportunities related to career, education, and community service. So, in order to support the government of Benin in developing country-level policy around reproductive health, Camber first wanted to take the time to deeply engage with youth, and better understand their hopes, plans for the futures, and challenges and joys in everyday life.

Working in partnership with the Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherche sur les Dynamiques Sociales et le Développement Local, Camber conducted a multi-faceted qualitative research with young men and women in rural and urban areas. The research combined a number of methodologies, and including focus groups, in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation. Through “photovoice” we asked participants to document their day-to-day lives with photography, generating rich visual data on their role models, ambitions, perspectives, and what matters to them.

This data generated a number of rich insights on youth’s experiences and needs around reproductive health. We learned, for instance, about young women’s aspirations and desire for family, interest in defying gender norms which limit women to the household, and frustration with a lack of work opportunities.  We heard about how women seek information on reproductive health, receiving a myriad of diverse messages (from friends, family, peers, media, health workers) while trying to discern the truth of what will work best for them in their lives. We heard about how young women’s outlooks differ from their mothers, and how they are navigating a landscape of rapidly shifting social norms.

These qualitative insights gave us perspective on how young women are experiencing numerous pressures, working towards multiple ambitions, and how their interest in and access to family planning sits at the intersection of social, cultural and economic factors in their lives. Based on these insights, we crafted a quantitative survey which allowed us to understand how these dynamics play out and impact family planning at a population level. We worked collaboratively with the government of Benin, and with local youth organizers, to develop a strategy for improving youth access to family planning, and a  communications plan to promote family planning in terms that resonate with young women and meet their needs. 

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This challenge was taken up by several central players in the nutrition and food fortification space. A core group of technical experts conceptualized the idea of developing a public database for high-quality data on food fortification, then calling upon Camber to manage the strategic alignment around shared goals, guide development of the database, and form a longer-term sustainability plan for the platform. Camber supported the early steps of this process, culminating in a formal announcement of the forthcoming database at a large global nutrition conference. Our team then worked to oversee the development of a prototype web-based platform, interfacing closely with an expert development team to co-design the web platform and test the preliminary database tool. 

Camber’s involvement culminated in the development of a high-level communication approach and corresponding materials to accompany the completed data platform. The web-based platform was formally launched to the public by the group of partners and is actively managed and updated by that group. It remains the only consolidated source of data on food fortification legislation status, fortification levels, and other critical information for country governments, donors, industry, and other key stakeholders. 

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To understand the unique healthcare needs of rural communities, Camber and the Rural Health Working Group engaged with caregivers, administrators, and other partners across Washington and Alaska. This included six trips to engage directly with local stakeholders in rural communities. Ultimately individuals from over 80 organizations were able to provide input on what they viewed as key challenges for their organizations where additional investment could drive positive change. 

Based on stakeholder input as well as additional market research with the support of rural health experts, Camber identified seventeen discrete investment areas that Premera could focus its efforts on. Working with the Rural Health Working Group, this was paired down to four priority investment areas which met the most pressing challenges in rural health, supported the implementation of services, and mutually reinforced the other investment areas. Camber then identified specific investments within these investment areas and created a strategy to disburse funds quickly within the desired timeframe. A preliminary set of grantees who met the criteria was then pulled from the network of stakeholders Premera had previously engaged with. 

For more information on Premera’s Rural Health Initiative, please see their website. 

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As the convenient care market has continued to evolve, with consolidation among major telehealth platforms and increasing competition among traditional payers and providers to capture a share of the market, competition has become fierce. Recognizing an opportunity to disrupt this market with an innovative and truly consumer-oriented offering, a leading technology company approached Camber for thought partnership in defining the market entry and expansion strategy for its new convenient care model.  This model is seeking to achieve a multi-billion dollar share of the care delivery market in providing affordable and convenient access to high-quality and integrated primary, behavioral and specialty care.  

Camber worked closely with the client and its internal teams to build an ambitious but practical go-to-market strategy across five customer segments and >50 initial target geographies.  This required analysis of addressable market-size by targeted sub-segments, mapping the competitive landscape, profiling key customer and partnership targets, incorporating regulatory considerations and constraints, and anticipating financial and operational contingencies.  

Camber’s involvement culminated in the completion of submission of the business plan to executive-level leadership, resulting in subsequent approval of the pilot and launch of the new business. Our team was subsequently re-engaged to evaluate market demand, capability gaps, financial implications, and feasibility for accelerating the launch timeline of one of the priority service offerings. 

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As a delivery modality often used in low resource settings, campaigns face challenges in reaching their targets for coverage and equity. The siloed nature of campaigns contributes to these challenges, as the field has historically lacked mechanisms to share learning across different campaigns, coordinate where multiple campaigns are executed concurrently, and limit unintended consequences on health delivery system.  

On behalf of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Camber conducted a landscape analysis of the campaign ecosystem to identify opportunities to improve coverage, equity, cost-effectiveness, and impact for campaigns across five priority health areas. The landscaping effort highlighted the need for a coalition committed to enhancing campaigns’ and health systems’ effectiveness to help address critical gaps and meet public health needs.   

Following the landscaping effort, the Foundation issued a grant to the Task Force for Global Health to bring together a group of core stakeholders to develop a coalition. Camber supported the Task Force in bringing together a variety of campaign stakeholders across the five health areas – including government actors, coordinating bodies, researchers and implementers – in collaborative working sessions to design an effective infrastructure for the coalition. The Health Campaign Effectiveness Coalition launched in late 2020, and since then has completed critical work to promote campaign learning, collaboration, systems change across health areas. 

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The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation engaged Camber to provide a strategic analysis of the demand landscape in Niger, relying on in-depth qualitative research and a national survey, and complemented by a robust supply analysis.  The work’s objective was to provide a common fact base that Niger’s family planning community—including Government and international donors—could use to drive decision-making, as well as to highlight gaps between supply and demand.

A nuanced picture of family planning in Niger emerged from this work. While there have been notable strides in contraceptive supply, the demand picture remains challenging, and will likely take significantly more time and resources to resolve. We found that many women in Niger do not believe that they have control over their own fertility decisions (they believe that Allah or their husbands have control), or they believe they have control, but want many children nevertheless. 

Within this broad demand landscape, we found significant variation in women’s demand for family planning.  Using advanced statistical analyses, we derived five segments of women with discrete family planning needs, attitudes, and behaviors—representing the first segmentation of its kind (predictive of human behavior) to be developed in reproductive health services in Africa.  In Niger’s resource constrained environment, the segmentation allows Government, donors, and NGOs to focus on segments with the highest potential for contraceptive uptake, or to take different segments’ needs into account when defining policy and programming.

We are currently working with a range of partners, including the Ministry of Health, Animas-Sutura, Pathfinder, EngenderHealth, and Population Services International, to integrate this work’s findings into family planning programming and communications in Niger. We are also expanding our insights and strategy work into Burkina Faso, Côte D’Ivoire, Mauritania and Togo.

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