A handful of cancer centers and their professional society are about to launch a big-data cancer quality initiative that will unlock previously inaccessible information on cancer care using millions of electronic health records.
The database, CancerLinQ, run by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, will go live in eight oncology practices later this year using a technology platform created by the software company SAP, the groups announced Wednesday.
The project aims to advance cancer care by providing clinicians instant feedback through clinical decision-making tools, the ability to uncover previously unseen patterns in patient treatment and outcomes, and offer more personalized insights into a patient's disease, ASCO leaders said. President Barack Obama heralded the promise of personalized medicine in his State of the Union address this week, announcing a new initiative to support “precision medicine.”
“We aim to take an unprecedented amount of patient data, identify meaningful and actionable insights and improve patient care. And we aim to do this faster than anybody has before,” said Dr. Clifford Hudis, the immediate past president of ASCO and chief of breast medicine service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York.
CancerLinQ will use Hana software, a high-speed, high-storage computing platform that Dr. David Delaney, chief medical officer for SAP Americas, said will be able to ingest data from multiple sources and quickly analyze, process and create value for queried data.
Eight practices have already signed agreements with ASCO and will be the first to participate: Inova Comprehensive Cancer & Research Institute; South Coast Centers for Cancer Care; New England Cancer Specialists; Medical Oncology Hematology Consultants; Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Marin Cancer Care; Space Coast Cancer Center; and Michiana Hematology-Oncology.
Another seven large cancer centers are in the process of joining, and the combined participation of those centers with the community practices will generate records for more than a half million patients, said Dr. Peter Yu, ASCO president.
ASCO members will not be charged a fee to participate. Yu declined to disclose the cost of the project but said it's in the “eight figures” range.
Obama said the goal of his Precision Medicine Initiative is to bring the U.S. closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes through access to personalized information.
Precision medicine is “a next logical step” in the application of molecular biology and the understanding of the underpinnings of cancer to individual patients, Memorial Sloan Kettering's Hudis said during an ASCO news conference Wednesday. Transforming multiple sources of data into an ideal treatment for patient is the crux of what the professional group is trying to do, he said.
Lynn Etheredge, who directs the Chevy Chase, Md.-based Rapid Learning Project—a program aimed at using big data and electronic health records to assess the effectiveness of medical treatments—says he is optimistic that projects like CancerLinQ will help make enough information, including genetic data, available to drive advances in personalized care.
There are many so-called gray zones in medicine where the most effective treatments can't be determined based on the current evidence. But for cancer in particular, use of genetics can lead to more precise diagnostic codes and more tailored treatments for patients. Continuing to conduct research without getting to that level of detail, “just leads you to different shades of gray,” Etheredge said.
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