Harold Freeman, Who Helped Remove Barriers to Cancer Treatment, Dies at 93

Harold P. Freeman, an influential oncology surgeon whose knowledge of the devastating effects of breast cancer on poor Black women inspired him to create a landmark program at Harlem Hospital Center, helping patients navigate the health care bureaucracy, died on Aug. 11 in Atlanta. He was 93.

His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his son Neale.

Dr. Freeman’s patient navigation program became a model for hospitals around the world, helping to eliminate barriers to early cancer detection. The program’s success influenced the passage of the federal Patient Navigator Outreach and Chronic Disease Prevention Act of 2005, which provided $25 million for similar programs across the United States. In 2024, Medicare began providing providers with reimbursement for some navigation services for cancer, heart failure, H.I.V./AIDS and other high-risk conditions.

“There are no navigation events or meetings that don’t acknowledge Dr. Freeman’s role in patient navigation,” Dr. Shanthi Sivendran, the interim chief patient officer of the American Cancer Society, said in an interview. “There wasn’t a patient navigation concept before him.”

When Dr. Freeman, who was Black, arrived at Harlem Hospital in 1967, he was convinced that his skills as a surgeon were the most effective weapon he had in the fight against cancer. But the obstacles — for him and his patients — were more daunting than he anticipated.

“I imagined that I could ‘cut cancer out of Harlem,’” he wrote in an opinion essay in The New York Times in 2014. “But I soon learned that the disease would not yield to a surgeon’s knife.”

His patients — often poor, single and uninsured, with children to care for — were frustrated by the barriers they faced. Some felt rebuffed when they initially sought treatment, only to return much later, once their cancers were advanced.