CancerLinQ LLC, a wholly owned nonprofit subsidiary of ASCO, has announced a collaborative effort with the Cancer Informatics for Cancer Centers (CI4CC). This initiative will bring the nation’s leading clinical, genomics, and biomedical informaticists, academicians, applied research information technology professionals, and data scientists together with the oncology community to help improve cancer care. It will facilitate cross-participation in a variety of avenues, including key forums, programmatic development, and alignment strategic opportunities to exchange best practices, break down silos, and accelerate the transformation of patient data into meaningful insights to impact care.

“Improving the quality and value of cancer care for everyone through big data is a team effort, requiring the innovations and ideas from every facet of the health community,” said CancerLinQ LLC CEO Kevin Fitzpatrick. “By working with CI4CC, we will be able to leverage the invaluable knowledge and experience of the organization’s leading informaticists and data scientists to help us enrich the data-laden capabilities of CancerLinQ™ and, ultimately, benefit patients everywhere.”

A real-world, rapid learning health IT system that offers research capabilities, data visualization and analytics tools, and clinical decision support as the solution of choice in oncology, CancerLinQ™ is bringing together the entire healthcare community by building coalitions to support collaboration, data sharing, and knowledge exchange to empower users in actionable, data-driven discovery and decision making. CancerLinQ™ and CI4CC will create a joint initiative to engage informatics leaders nationally.

“This type of alignment is crucial as accessible available data grows substantially; together we can liberate the data in collaboration to benefit patients and medicine by improving care efficiencies, treatment availability, and the quality of care,” said Debra A. Patt, MD, MPH, MBA, Editor-in-Chief of JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics. “This collaboration combines the knowledge of the leading minds in oncology and informatics for the purpose and will help improve the quality of care for people living with cancer.”

The new collaboration will establish an informatics advisory council for CancerLinQ™ comprised of leading experts from cancer centers across the nation and will place a CancerLinQ representative on a CI4CC Leadership Board. The collaboration will facilitate cross-filtration and cross-participation in a variety of avenues, including key forums, engagement in programmatic development, and alignment in strategic opportunities.

“The promise and potential impact of coming together to galvanize our leadership and leverage our mutual expertise is enormous,” said CI4CC Co-Founder Sorena Nadaf, who serves as the City of Hope Chief Informatics Officer, Senior Vice President, and Director of Digital Health Innovation and Data Science. “Breaking down the silos and creating this dedicated forum to enable collaboration and knowledge exchange is the way we will accelerate the transformation of care.”

CI4CC is a nonprofit organization that provides the leading national forum for academically focused research from informatics scientists, as well as for engagement of senior cancer informatics and technology leaders at academic cancer centers around the world and the 70 U.S. NCI-funded cancer centers.

“The informatics community has an important responsibility to share its expertise and best practices in data sharing, aggregation and analysis and ultimately turning said data into meaningful information to transform care,” said Dr. Warren A. Kibbe, CI4CC co-founder and the Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology at the National Cancer Institute.

CancerLinQ™ is a powerful platform containing vast amounts of real-world cancer information. This national initiative will allow cancer providers to improve the quality and value of care by analyzing millions of cancer patient medical records, uncovering patterns and trends, and measuring their care against that of their peers and recommended guidelines. The platform uses SAP Connected Health built on the SAP HANA^® platform, a flexible, multi-purpose data management and application platform created by SAP.

CancerLinQ™ is supported in part through the Conquer Cancer Foundation, whose generous donors have helped make the system possible. Major supporters include Amgen; Astellas; AstraZeneca; Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals Inc.; Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Cancer Treatment Centers of America®; Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation; Genentech BioOncology™; HELSINN; Janssen Oncology; Lilly; Novartis Oncology; Pfizer Oncology; Raj Mantena, RPh; Susan G. Komen; and Thomas G. Roberts, Jr., MD, and Susan M. DaSilva.

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