As senior vice president of cancer care, Timothy Seay-Morrison, EdD, leads strategy and operations for one of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care’s largest service lines. Part of Stanford (Calif.) Medicine, Stanford Health Care is a nonprofit academic medical system that includes a major quaternary hospital and a broad network of faculty and community physicians across the Bay Area.
Mr. Morrison recently joined the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast” to discuss key priorities for academic cancer programs, including expanding clinical trials infrastructure, navigating research funding uncertainty and extending access to specialized cancer care through partnerships and network growth.
Here is an excerpt from the conversation:
Editor’s note: This transcription has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: As senior vice president of cancer care, what major priorities or challenges are you focused on heading into 2026?
Dr. Timothy Seay-Morrison: Like many of [Becker’s] listeners, we’re focused on headwinds with the changing regulatory environment and pressure on health systems. As an academic system, we think about site of service changes, Medicaid shifts and the liability of understanding what will be covered and what won’t. Also, the liability of telehealth legislation has a big impact here at Stanford Health Care; we’re a very high user of virtual care […] across our enterprise. It’s a leading part of our access strategy because of the real estate compression that exists. We’re able to extend our reach by using telehealth, so it’s really, really important to us.
[Thinking about cancer, we are focused on] the research funding implications, changes in overhead and NIH funding. We’re watching [these things] because, in our minds, they pose a threat to the integrity of academic medicine and also our shared mission, which is being able to advance science to help democratize great healthcare treatments. Specifically in cancer, we think about making sure that our research enterprise and our clinical trial capabilities and enrollment can remain strong. That takes infrastructure capability and enhancement, and it takes creativity around funding and efficiency.
Listen to the full episode here.
