ASCO: CancerLinQ to provide 'big data' to improve patient care

ASCO today announced the partnership between its wholly owned subsidiary CancerLinQ and the software company SAP SE to provide a platform for the real-time sharing of cancer data.

“With the help of SAP’s technology and insights, we will turn the vision of high-quality cancer care for patients everywhere, into a reality,” Peter Paul Yu, MD, FACP, FASCO, ASCO president and director of cancer research at Palo Alto Medical Foundation, said during a press briefing.

Peter Paul Yu

Only about 3% of patients with cancer participate in clinical trials, leaving data on treatment strategies and their outcomes from the majority of cancer patients unreachable, Yu said.

“CancerLinq promises to change that; instead of learning from the 3% of patients, we will learn from almost every patient,” Yu said. “It will provide real-time quality feedback to providers, allowing physicians to compare their actual care against guidelines. It will uncover patterns that can improve care, revealing new previously unseen patterns in patient characteristics, treatment and outcomes. It will feed personalized insights to doctors, offering individualized and unbiased decision support for every patient and every type of cancer.”

CancerLinq will utilize SAP’s HANA platform to aggregate the data and provide tools, services and products for clinical decision support and data analyses.

These data will benefit patients, physicians, researchers and private and public health care payers, said Clifford A. Hudis, MD, FACP, ASCO’s immediate past president and chief of breast medicine service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

“CancerLinQ will connect and analyze data from almost every patient,” Hudis said. “It will organize the recent explosion of cancer information into usable knowledge.”

Eight community practices and large cancer centers will be included in the launch of CancerLinq later in 2015, with an additional seven practices to join shortly thereafter. Together, these practices will provide data from approximately 500,000 patients.

“One of the exciting things about CancerLinq is to bridge a difficulty we often have taking care of patients by translating data from highly selected patients who participated in a clinical trial to the real-world situations of the patients who we see,” said Therese M. Mulvey, MD, physician-in-chief of Southcoast Centers for Cancer Care in Massachusetts, one of the first eight programs to join CancerLinq this year. “We expect that this really will transform cancer care delivery. We’ll be able to query the database regarding toxicity and tolerance of various chemotherapeutic regimens from the database of thousands of like patients. We’ll have access to real-time data on processes and outcomes to improve the care we deliver to patients,” Mulvey said.

The database also will help provide more data on molecular markers and long-term outcomes of cancer survivors, she said.

“Big data that is locked in electronic medical records or in molecular diagnostic labs have tremendous potential in health care, and we’re all excited about that vision,” Yu said. “As oncologists, we have a professional responsibility to continually improve patient care and outcomes. By teaming up with SAP, CancerLinq is making a huge leap toward becoming the platform of choice for oncologists.”

For more information:

ASCO CancerLinq. Available at: http://cancerlinq.org/. Accessed Jan. 21, 2015.