The goal of coordinating pathways for cancer patients through their diagnostic and treatment journey is often approached by borrowing strategies from traditional industries, including standardization, process redesign, and variation reduction. However, the usefulness of these strategies is sometimes limited in the face of the complexity and uncertainty that characterize these processes over time and the situation at both patient and institutional levels. We found this to be the case when we did an in-depth qualitative study of coordination processes in patient pathways for three diagnoses in four Norwegian hospitals. What allows these hospitals to accomplish coordination is supplementing standardization with improvisation. This improvisation is embedded in four types of emerging semi-formal structures: collegial communities, networks, boundary spanners, and physical proximity. The hierarchical higher administrative levels appear to have a limited ability to manage and support coordination of these emerging structures when needed. We claim that this can be explained by viewing line management as representative of an economic–administrative institutional logic while these emerging structures represent a medical–professional logic that privileges proximity to the variation and complexity in the situations. The challenge is then to find a way for emergent and formal structures to coexist.

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e13634 Background: Norway, a country with a publicly funded health care system, was in 2018-19 lagging behind with respect to implementation of precision cancer medicine (PCM). Methods: Our approach mid-2019 was very simple and set out three aims: i) To establish access to advanced molecular diagnostics to allow identification and stratification of cancer patients into clinical trials; ii) To increase the volume of clinical trials with a PCM approach to gain experience and build competence; and iii) In parallel work for implementation of PCM into standard of care. Results: In a trans-disciplinary project we worked along four lines: i) Gathered support to have oncologists, hematologists, pathologists and cancer researchers join a nation-wide, bottom-up initiative with a few common priorities; ii) Liaised with executives and regulators in regional health care systems, The Ministry of Health and other public stakeholders and charities to have the top-down approaches meet the bottom-up initiative; iii) Aligned with industry to explore the possibility of a public-private partnership and iv) Coordinated with other PCM initiatives internationally. Over the past two years we have thus built and raised funding for: a) The InPreD-Norway national infrastructure delivering precision cancer diagnostics for patient identification and stratification into clinical trials (publicly reimbursed) and operating the national molecular tumor board; b) the IMPRESS-Norway national researcher-initiated PCM intervention trial (https://impressnorway.com), which opened for inclusion Q2 2021 and runs at all hospitals that treat cancer patients (18 hospitals). The trial is modelled on and coordinated with the Dutch DRUP trial and aligned with similar trials in the Nordic countries; c) the INSIGHT/INCLUDE projects for research on control cohorts, use of real world evidence (RWE), health economics and reimbursement models, and ethics, legal aspects and governance; and d) the CONNECT public-private partnership (https://www.connectnorway.org) for PCM implementation with 29 partners (14 pharma & biotech companies, 9 public partners and 4 NGOs) for interaction with InPreD and IMPRESS initiatives and providing a forum that includes regulators and payors for policy discussions of reimbursement models and regulatory framework. Conclusions: Our experience could serve as a model for building a functioning ecosystem for implementation of PCM. Unique aspects include the nation-wide initiative, the population effect of the diagnostics to be offered and the integration of a public-private partnership.

Cancer incidence is increasing, and cancer is a leading cause of death in the Scandinavian countries, and at the same time more efficient but very expensive new treatment options are available. Based on the increasing demand, high expectations and limited resources, crises in public legitimacy of cancer care evolved in the three Scandinavian countries. Similar cancer care reforms were introduced in the period 2007-2015 to address the crisis.In this article we explore processes triggering these reforms in countries with similar and well-developed health care systems. The common objective was the need to reduce time from referral to start treatment, and the tool introduced to accomplish this was integrated care pathways for cancer diagnosis, that is Cancer Patient Pathways.This study investigates the process by drawing on interviews with key actors and public documents. We identified three main logics in play; the economicadministrative, the medical and the patient-related logic and explored how institutional entrepreneurs skillfully aligned these logics. The article contributes by describing the triggering processes on politically initiated similar reforms in the three countries studied and also contributes to a better understanding on the orchestrating of politicallyThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.