A New Model for Cancer Care
Cancer care is a years-long journey that can span dozens of institutions, treatment lines, imaging facilities, specialist offices, and emergency departments. For Color Health, that complexity defines its patient population, and is compounded by a harder reality: reaching the patients who have the least access to the expertise they need. "What motivates me is making sure that people in healthcare deserts have access to first-rate care, without needing to be close to a large healthcare network," said Ghita Soulimani, Chief of Staff of Product & Engineering.
Challenge: A Data Problem at the Scale of Cancer
Color delivers oncologist-led care across the full cancer journey: screening, active treatment, and survivorship. Its clinicians need a complete picture of every patient before each visit. For people in active treatment or survivorship, that picture is built from thousands of documents, not hundreds. Getting those records the old way wasn't working.
Before Metriport, Color didn't have a health information exchange (HIE) in place. Building a record for a new patient meant asking where they had received care, assembling a list of facilities, drafting record requests, faxing forms, and creating follow-up task sequences.
“Getting records was an extreme burden. Beyond all of the complexity, it delayed how quickly we could give care to the patient. Metriport is critical for accessing comprehensive patient records, quickly.”
Depending on the case, that process consumed between 30 minutes to two hours of active admin time per patient.
Solution: Comprehensive Records. Clinical-Grade Security.
Built on a Foundation of Trust
As a trusted steward of sensitive patient data, Color subjects all vendors to a rigorous security and privacy review. Metriport met these requirements as a HIPAA-compliant, SOC 2 Type II-certified platform, externally audited and built with hardened access controls that restrict patient data to authorized personnel.
Going from 0-60
Color started with Metriport's patient dashboard, validated coverage across their population, then moved to a full API integration. ADT monitoring followed, giving the clinical team real-time alerts when patients are admitted or discharged from a facility.
The transition from pilot to production took less than two weeks, one of the fastest onboarding timelines Color had experienced with any SaaS vendor.
“We didn't need any integration support to get started. Going from demo to up and running for our clinicians took less than two weeks.”
Records That Match the Journey's Complexity
Cancer patients arrive with records spread across years and institutions: oncology notes, consult reports, diagnostic results, imaging studies, ED admissions. Every data point matters, and missing one can leave a critical gap.
Metriport's medical record summaries give Color's clinicians a way into that complexity. Rather than reading every document before a visit, providers anchor to a structured summary, then drill into specific FHIR resources where needed.
“It's not uncommon to get over 1,000 pages of records for a single patient. The summary helps us figure out where to focus and which parts of the record to dig into deeper.”
Results: Oncology Care Delivered at Scale
Starting with a Full Picture
The administrative savings are measurable. But for Color's clinical team, the larger shift is qualitative. Where clinicians once spent hours hunting down records, the data is now waiting for them.
“Metriport surfaces the patient data and care gaps we would have otherwise spent hours hunting down.”
Patients in active treatment, many of whom have told their story to dozens of providers over years of care, aren’t asked to repeat it again. Visits can start where they should: on what the patient needs now. "It allows us to put that admin work aside and really focus every moment we have on caring for patients, even at scale," Suzuki said.
Built for Growth
For Color, that scale is significant. The clinic now serves more than one million people through employers, health plans, and unions. Getting each clinical team prepared for every visit, without hours of preparation, is how quality holds together as volume grows.
The value runs in both directions. Through Metriport, Color also pushes records back to the HIE network, contributing to shared knowledge about patients across providers. That bidirectional flow strengthens care coordination and reflects Color's broader mission: a more connected system benefits every patient, not just those in Color's own care.