Designing a Strategic Coordination Office for a Growing Oncology Network
A leading U.S. oncology Management Services Organization (MSO) had outgrown the informal processes it relied on to coordinate strategic initiatives across its practices. Acquis designed a Strategic Coordination Office that gave leadership a repeatable way to plan and execute work across the network practices while preserving the flexibility individual practices needed to operate effectively.
One of the nation's largest community oncology MSOs
The client is a large healthcare services network supporting independent oncology practices across the United States. The organization provides affiliated practices with access to capital, clinical infrastructure, purchasing power, operational support, and more. Backed by a major healthcare corporation, the network has expanded rapidly and now supports more than 30 oncology practices nationwide.
Growth exposed the gap between client promise and practice reality
Each practice relies on the client to support outcomes it could not achieve on its own: sustainable growth, operational efficiency, returns on capital investment, and the capacity to serve more patients. As the organization added practices, leadership struggled to coordinate initiatives across the network and deliver that support consistently at scale. Three breakdowns defined that gap:
Investments without sequencing: Practices pursued growth strategies, technology migrations, and revenue cycle initiatives without a clear view of how they fit against competing priorities, leading to slower returns and misallocated support.
Execution without visibility: Leadership had no reliable read on what was underway across the network and could not tell whether critical initiatives were on track or where they needed to intervene.
Demand without capacity alignment: The client allocated support resources reactively, leaving high-impact initiatives under-resourced while lower-stakes work consumed available bandwidth.
Designing a Strategic Coordination Office
Acquis partnered with the client's COO and Head of Strategy & Operations to design and build a Strategic Coordination Office from the ground up.
Over a 14-week engagement, Acquis conducted stakeholder interviews across the client's leadership and functional teams, mapped how initiatives moved through the organization, and identified where work stalled, competed for attention, or lacked ownership.
Acquis delivered three interconnected components:
An eight-stage operating methodology spanning the full lifecycle of a strategic initiative, from intake and practice-level planning through implementation, performance tracking, and reporting. Each stage included defined process steps and decision frameworks.
Role-specific responsibilities with explicit ownership across every member of the PEO and every stage, enabling work to move without ambiguity.
A governance structure including meeting cadences, escalation triggers, and reporting templates that give leadership a consistent view of initiative status and resource demands across the network.
The Strategic Coordination Office houses proactive strategy for each practice and tracks, manages, and reports on execution. Support aligns to practice complexity and operational need, and the Strategic Coordination Office coordinates across functions without displacing the relationships and established ownership structures. Acquis grounded the Strategic Coordination Office’s staffing in activity-level analysis, building estimates from the work each role performs. At key milestones throughout the engagement, Acquis socialized the model with the client's leadership to pressure-test assumptions, surface concerns, and build the alignment needed to move from design to implementation. The team closely partnered with the Strategy & Operations team throughout, providing the operational context that shaped every design decision.
A repeatable operating system for proactive strategy and execution
The engagement produced a complete operating model that senior leadership aligned on and stood ready to implement.
Acquis built the Strategic Coordination Office around a pod structure that organizes dedicated support across more than 30 oncology practices nationwide. Each pod pairs a Strategy & Operations resource with a new Strategic Coordination role. Together, they give regional leadership the infrastructure needed to plan proactively, manage execution, and track performance across every practice they support.
The model includes a phased rollout plan that begins with a pilot pod and scales across the full network through the second half of 2026. Acquis selected the technology to support the full initiative lifecycle from intake and prioritization through execution tracking and reporting. The governance structure defines how the pods operate day to day, including meeting cadences, decision rights, reporting flows, and escalation paths.
The client now has the structure to act on strategic priorities across every practice and the room to absorb more practices as the network grows.
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