Transforming Cancer Detection and Treatment With AI-Driven Healthy Person Program

This is the third blog post in a 6-part series recognizing the achievements of the 2025 ACCC Innovator Award winners before their in-depth sessions at the ACCC 42nd National Oncology Conference. Learn more about the innovations being recognized this year and those who pioneered them by joining ACCC in Denver, Colorado, from October 15-17, 2025.

Though they constitute nearly 20% of patients with cancer in the US, individuals living in rural areas continue to face barriers to accessing high-quality care, chief among them the closure of 194 rural hospitals since 2005. Unsurprisingly, the life expectancy gap between rural and urban Americans has widened as well in the last 2 decades.

Determined to transform health care for the hundreds of thousands of patients in its community, Central Kentucky Cancer Care, which is affiliated with Georgetown Community Hospital and is part of Lifepoint Health, launched the Healthy Person Program. This program leverages artificial intelligence to analyze the health records of all patients who have received care at Lifepoint Health facilities across the country and identify those who are at risk of developing catastrophic diseases. In addition to positively impacting over 280,000 patients, this initiative landed the program a 2025 Association of Cancer Care Centers (ACCC) Innovator Award. In anticipation of the ACCC 42nd National Oncology Conference this fall, ACCCBuzz spoke with Bart Daugherty, vice president of clinical technology and systems at Lifepoint Health.

ACCCBuzz: How long has Lifepoint Health been an ACCC member?

Daugherty: Of the 5 ACCC member cancer programs affiliated with Lifepoint, UPHS Marquette, [Marquette, Michigan] has been a member since 1978, followed by Georgetown Community Hospital’s Central Kentucky Cancer Care [Georgetown, Kentucky] in 2017. Frye Regional Medical Center’s Cancer Center [Hickory, North Carolina] became an ACCC member program in 2002, and both Meadowview Regional Medical Center [Maysville, Kentucky], and Lake Cumberland Regional Hospital [Somerset, Kentucky] became member programs in 2024.

ACCCBuzz: What do you enjoy most about being an ACCC member? Are there specific programs, resources, or tools that you use as part of your cancer program?

Daugherty: We really value all the resources related to patient navigation and financial advocacy. Our centers primarily serve rural and nonurban communities, so it’s very helpful for us to find strategies to ensure all of our patients can continue to access high-quality cancer care.

ACCCBuzz: What makes Lifepoint Health unique?

Daugherty: Since we primarily serve small, rural/nonurban communities across the country, not every patient with cancer is treated in our hospitals. It’s our job, therefore, to identify cancer as quickly as possible and then help connect the patient to a higher level of care at another facility so they can begin treatment in a timely manner. The technology we’ve developed to do so has been a gamechanger in getting patients the care they need much earlier in their journey.

ACCCBuzz: It can be challenging for administrators and C-suite leaders to share a common language with clinicians and others who provide direct patient care. Can you share any tips you used to obtain buy-in and support for your innovation?

Daugherty: My job was to prove the value of the Healthy Person Program and demonstrate how it advances our mission of making communities healthier—and I still do so every year. I need to demonstrate that it is achieving the goal of early and accurate identification of cancer and that it is benefiting the patients in our communities. We are fortunate to have strong buy-in from Lifepoint’s executive team, and they have been tremendous advocates and supporters of the program from the beginning. From my experience, that is typically the biggest initial hurdle for championing an innovation—proving that it not only enables better care for patients, but also makes financial sense and helps the hospital to grow.

ACCCBuzz: ACCC president Una Hopkins, DNP, MSN, FNP-BC, NE-BC, RN, FACCC, centered her theme on Designing Oncology Care to Meet the Needs of a Growing Patient Population. A key component of that theme is Technology as a Workforce Multiplier, which was key to your innovation. Can you share any insights you’ve learned in this area?

Daugherty: When we first started the Healthy Person Program, I relied heavily on local care coordinators and navigators in every one of Lifepoint’s hospitals. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we had 88 hospitals in 30 states at the time, and many staff members were pulled into more critical care, or their roles were otherwise reassigned. Meanwhile, we had a large number of patients who potentially had cancer, but they weren’t being notified. In response, we worked with our partners at Eon to build a care management solution that allowed us to centralize everything we did into a sort of national call center that our staff could manage without being in the hospital. This, in turn, allowed us to expand the program across multiple cohorts without adding any additional resources. We now have a relatively small team of about 30 staff members who manage 9 disease cohorts across 30 states.

In the future, we want to expand our program to other types of cancer, as there is ample opportunity to improve adherence for screening for cervical cancer, in particular. As our program evolves, our guiding principle will continue to be getting all patients the care they need at every stage of the cancer continuum, and to reduce time to treatment. Right now, we primarily work in the acute space within the 4 walls of the hospital, but we’re planning to move into ambulatory care as well.