Harlan Levine on cancer care for the mailroom and the boardroom

What this conversation is about

Harlan Levine is a physician who runs strategy and business ventures at City of Hope and chairs the board of AccessHope, the organization’s subsidiary built to serve the employer market. He joined Glenn Llopis on Personalization Outbreak to talk about why large employers have to put health and wellbeing first, and the conversation kept returning to one question: who actually gets the best care.

He starts with the institution’s own words, carved on its ceremonial gates:

"we have an expression that says there's no profit in curing the body. If in the process we destroy the soul, we really try to take care of the whole person." — Harlan Levine · 00:01:12

Glenn asked him early on why he finds his most authentic self when he is helping people through a health crisis. The answer says something about how he leads:

"the closer I can get to really being a hands-on physician, the better I feel about what I do." — Harlan Levine · 00:03:14

Employers were already in the health business

Levine corrects a common assumption. Employers did not enter healthcare during the pandemic; healthcare has sat near the top of their expense lines for years. What changed is how they think about it. Virtual care moved from an add-on to an integral part of care, and the disparities specialists had documented in cancer for decades finally surfaced in public awareness, because the pandemic made it unmistakable that outcomes differ by who you are and where you live.

He lays out those disparities across cancers, ages and communities, and is careful to note they are not only about race. The point that matters for employers is simple: if a solution does not address those facts directly, the gaps will not close. He is also fair about why it took so long, since affordability, access and psychosocial support have all competed for attention.

Clinical trials are undersubscribed overall, and minority and underserved populations are underrepresented within that already small group. Screening follows the same pattern, so diagnoses come later.

One size fits all breaks on cancer

Benefits used to be simple, Levine says: everyone got the same plan. Now four or five generations work side by side, and cancer reaches all of them at once, because it rarely touches only the patient. Some people in the workforce have cancer; others are caring for a parent, a spouse or a child who does.

He does not dismiss standardization. To pay claims, run a network and scale a benefit, you need a common structure. It just is not enough here:

"you need to have a certain element that is one size fit all, but it's not really sufficient for the cancer patient. Cancer is different." — Harlan Levine · 00:19:58

His reasoning is clinical rather than rhetorical. Guidelines for blood pressure or diabetes are stable. In cancer, optimal care changes by the week, genomics has multiplied the number of distinct diagnoses, and the specialization required now exceeds what any general oncologist can track. His respect for those generalists is explicit: they do an important job, and what they need is a system that brings them the right information at the right moment.

Checking the box, or meaning something

Glenn brought up a gap he had seen in a 2021 CEO study: executives were far more likely than employees to say the organization supported people’s physical and emotional health. Levine did not find that surprising at all:

"So you can check the box, but if you're the recipient of it ... are those interventions or those programs, are they meaningful to me? And that's very different." — Harlan Levine · 00:25:01

Two different questions are being answered. The executive is asked whether action was taken. The employee is asked whether it meant anything. Closing that gap, he says, means tailoring programs to the individual, including how different people prefer to receive information, at a moment when medicine itself is personalizing down to the genomic level. He adds a practical point about trust: employees do not naturally look to a health plan or an employer portal for health information, and a trusted clinical brand changes whether the message lands at all.

The mailroom and the boardroom

The design decision behind AccessHope is the heart of this interview:

"we got into a room four years ago, and we said, we're not going to think like a hospital, and we're not going to think like a health plan. We're going to build a program around ... the individual patient and their doctor." — Harlan Levine · 00:31:16

Rather than requiring patients to travel to a comprehensive cancer center, the program takes that expertise to the patient and to the physician already treating them, through employers and health plans. On the most complex cases it intervenes proactively, so the patient does not have to lift a finger, and anyone who wants a second opinion can ask for one. Because plenty of people do not want a formal second opinion but still need help, there is also a support line any covered person can call about themselves or a family member.

Levine tells one story he says he will never forget: supervisors and store managers calling the line themselves. As he recounts it, the call goes something like this:

"my employee, Mary has cancer, and I want to help her take the first step. Can I put her on the phone?" — Harlan Levine · 00:32:17

They never designed for that, and it tells him how deeply cancer lands in a workplace, and how good people are. Glenn drew the conclusion for employers watching their people reassess what they want from work:

"it's not so much about someone's salary anymore. It's about the totality of how they're treated as an individual." — Glenn Llopis · 00:40:22

Levine’s closing hope is unusual for an executive: that others copy the model and compete with them, because what the system does today is not good enough.