Loud work gets measured. Essential work gets assumed.
Coordination in cancer care is sustained by invisible labour. We have started to measure it.
The lived experience
"I don't know if someone's doing it. So I'm probably going to do it just in case."
“I said I need the tissue samples and the reports, because the cases were challenging and unclear. I think I am the only one in my team doing that.”
“Many coordination failures in oncology are framed as communication issues between specialties. In my experience, they are more often structural workflow problems.”
“I grew into it.”
Cancer care professionals shared these in our Cancer Care Coordination Roundtables.
What the study reveals
The study asked cancer care professionals about their own teams: which coordination tasks they carry, whether that work is formally recognised, how they rate the six dimensions, and who holds coordination together.
Four patterns stand out.
- Coordination work is carried, and inconsistently recognised. Of eight coordination tasks, managing conflict between colleagues is the one most often carried without formal recognition.
- Many respondents describe coordination resting on one individual. Often that person does not hold a leadership role.
- Increasing case volume and workforce instability are the drivers of changing demand named most often. Technology-related drivers are named less often.
- Respondents named a priority dimension before and after rating all six. Many named a different one at the end, most often communication clarity.
Together, these point to coordination capacity as workforce infrastructure, sustained today by work that goes unrecognised.
The full findings are presented at EONS19, within the ESMO Congress 2026, in Madrid on 24 October 2026.
Why this work is invisible
Nobody designs coordination into cancer care. It is inherited. Every specialisation, every new protocol, every AI tool adds complexity. The coordination that holds it together is absorbed by the people closest to the gaps. It runs on informal knowledge, personal relationships, and workarounds accumulated over years. It has no job description, no dataset, no line in any governance framework.
When it works, nobody notices. When it fails, the expertise and the data are still there. The system simply cannot move.
“When the table wobbles, we blame the person who leans on it.”
Corina Richter, Roundtable 1
The people who design clinical workflows are not the people who absorb the demands those workflows create. That distance is where coordination capacity lives and where it breaks.
What Nexus Recognita is doing about it
An increasingly complex system that cannot see the people who hold it together cannot care for the humans it exists for.
We study the work these people do, through research and open conversation.
We make coordination in cancer care visible, measurable and improvable.
Coordination is capacity. We work with care teams as a paid service to show it and grow it.
About us
Nexus Recognita was founded in 2025 by István Borbíró, PhD, and Corina Richter.
István worked for years alongside oncology and haematology experts across Europe. Corina works on complex systems and organisational development.
We started because we kept seeing the same pattern across countries and institutions. Each advance in treatment added coordination work for the team, and that work was planned nowhere.
Nobody measured it. Now someone does.
The Six Dimensions Framework
Six dimensions of coordination capacity, built from analysis of 69+ peer-reviewed studies on healthcare team coordination across 25+ countries.
These are the six places where coordination works or breaks in your team. The study measured all of them.
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We share what we are learning as the research develops. Findings worth your time, when we have them. *