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More than 80% of patients with cancer receive care in community-based practices, according to Edward S. Kim, MD, MBA, of City of Hope National Medical Center. To bridge the resulting research access gap, City of Hope has built HopeLLM community oncology trials matching capabilities designed specifically to serve non-academic clinicians.
Why the HopeLLM Community Oncology Trials Gap Exists
Far removed from academic medical hubs where disease-specific specialists typically track trial portfolios, community oncologists managing a broad array of distinct malignancies each day face a significant operational hurdle in keeping pace with relevant protocols across multiple tumor types.
Kim’s Own Framing of the Problem
“When we work at academic systems, and I have worked at both academic and non-academic systems, we tend to believe the world revolves around a specialist,” Kim said in a conversation with CancerNetwork. “I am a specialist in lung cancer, and that is something I value, and I know patients value it. The truth is, more than 80% of our patients are seen in non-academic, community-based practices. That is where we have to connect our communication, our clinical trials, and our expertise.”
The Operational Challenge Behind HopeLLM Community Oncology Trials
City of Hope’s network features a heterogeneous mix of embedded community practices and academic campuses, requiring support for physicians and providers in community-based settings who are not surrounded by disease experts yet are now being asked to offer clinical trials.
Illustrating the Scale of the Problem
“In a specialist’s clinic, say, a lung cancer specialist, the first 5 patients of the day might all have lung cancer, so it is easy to keep track of the relevant trials,” Kim explained. “In a community practice, the first patient might have colon cancer, the second breast cancer, the third head and neck cancer, the fourth pancreatic cancer, and the fifth lymphoma. How many trials cover those 5 different cancer types? We are working to make that easier.”
What HopeLLM Community Oncology Trials Matching Actually Does
City of Hope is internally building HopeLLM, which has several components, one being clinical trial matching. Whether a provider is on a campus or at a community site, they can use the program to match City of Hope’s clinical trials against what is in a patient’s records.
Why This Matters for Non-Academic Providers
Kim described this trial-matching capability as “a real game changer for our providers who are not on our academic campuses,” directly addressing the core disparity between specialist-heavy academic settings and the broader, more varied patient population community oncologists actually treat day to day.
How This Fits City of Hope’s Broader AI Strategy
This clinical trial matching function represents one component within HopeLLM’s larger set of capabilities, part of City of Hope’s broader push, first announced in a June 2025 news release, to deploy AI-powered healthcare innovations aimed at enabling nationwide best-in-class cancer care.
Why Automating Trial Matching Serves a Democratization Goal
By automating the cross-referencing of patient records against open clinical trials, HopeLLM is designed to empower community clinicians to rapidly connect eligible patients with multidisciplinary protocols, effectively democratizing access to innovative oncology research across diverse healthcare settings rather than concentrating it within academic hubs alone.
What This HopeLLM Community Oncology Trials Approach Means Going Forward
Given that more than 80% of cancer patients receive care outside academic medical centers, tools like HopeLLM that specifically target the trial-awareness gap facing community oncologists could meaningfully expand the population of patients who learn about and enroll in relevant clinical trials. As City of Hope continues developing HopeLLM’s other components beyond trial matching, this approach may offer a template for how large academic health systems with embedded community practice networks can extend research access without requiring every community-based provider to independently track protocols across dozens of distinct tumor types.
What to Watch Going Forward
As HopeLLM’s trial-matching capability continues rolling out across City of Hope’s network of academic and community sites, industry observers will likely watch for data on whether the tool measurably increases clinical trial enrollment among community-based patients who might otherwise never learn about relevant protocols. Given Kim’s framing of this as addressing a fundamental structural gap in cancer care delivery, this HopeLLM community oncology trials matching model may prove instructive for other health systems with similar academic-community hybrid networks seeking to expand research access beyond their specialist-heavy campuses.
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