Is Big Data analytics the secret to improving cancer treatment?

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), a non-profit, world-leading, professional organization of oncologists, is on the brink of translating huge amounts of raw cancer data into knowledge that can be applied to best help future patients.

Currently, the volume of existing data on cancer research and specific patients is immense. Cancer is attributed to one out of every four deaths in the United States alone, so to analyze and compare each specific instance of the disease seems impossible.

At the SAP Personalized Medicine Symposium in Palo Alto on October 14th, 2015, Peter Paul Yu, MD, FACP, FASCO and immediate past president of ASCO, spoke to the importance of being able to access, search, and utilize all of the information that can help stop this often fatal disease.

The Human Genome

Only 3% of the 1.7 million Americans diagnosed with cancer are enrolled in clinical trials. Dr. Yu explained that most patients are on average older, less healthy, and more diverse than clinical trial patients.

During the Symposium, Dr. Yu explained that health IT promises to be an agent of change, accelerating learning, reducing healthcare costs, and engaging the health ecosystem of patients and families, researchers, payers, and regulators. He also explained how ASCO's CancerLinQ, a rapid learning health system for oncology, can lead this effort.

CancerLinQ runs on the SAP HANA platform and uses Big Data analytics to unlock real-world patient data from electronic health records (EHRs). Each stage of CancerLinQ will deliver more-powerful tools and insights to physicians, researchers, patients, and others in the cancer community by:

Monitoring clinical quality measures in real time - continually tracking performance to prospectively improve the quality of care

Considering trends that could improve care - gaining insights from de-identified data on thousands of patients

Identifying groups of anonymous patients with shared characteristics - making it possible for physicians to understand how other patients similar to theirs were treated

Making better use of EHRs - by creating, for example, a personalized patient timeline that provides a visual snapshot of a patient's treatments, side effects, and outcomes

Yu also explained that, in its current state, interoperability is a key challenge in the healthcare industry. He quoted the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology by sharing this statement:

"An interoperable health IT ecosystem makes the right data available to the right people at the right time across products and organizations in a way that can be meaningfully used by recipients."

Yu shared ASCO's recommendations to improve health IT with the following suggestions in his presentation:

Currently, entire EHR data on all patients from oncology practices in the United States is being uploaded into the CancerLinQ platform. The goal is for the first version of CancerLinQ to be used by practices in 2016.

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This blog originally appeared on SCN in SAP Business Trends.