CancerLinQ: ASCO’s Efforts to Convene the Cancer Community in the Area of Big Data

Mar 01, 2017

This is the fourth article in a five-part series that will provide an overview of ASCO’s history and mission and how its innovative big data platform, CancerLinQ®, is supporting and furthering the Society’s objectives. Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

In the first three parts of this series, we have outlined ASCO’s commitment to quality and some of its initiatives, including the CancerLinQ® platform, designed to improve the quality of care for patients with cancer. In this part, we will discuss two of ASCO’s latest offerings aimed at harnessing the potential offered by the ever-expanding quantities of big data and the knowledge it is creating in the oncology community: CancerLinQ Discovery™ and the newly launched JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics (JCO CCI).

In late November 2016, ASCO announced that its nonprofit subsidiary CancerLinQ LLC was developing CancerLinQ Discovery™, a new offering—to be made available to the entire cancer community—of curated, de-identified sets of clinical data pulled from the fast-growing CancerLinQ® database.

Once CancerLinQ Discovery™ is fully up and running, researchers will be able to submit requests to the CancerLinQ Discovery Research & Publications Committee for customized analytic reports prepared by the CancerLinQ informatics team or cloud-based access to subcohorts of anonymized and statistically de-identified CancerLinQ data that they can analyze with approved software to address the population of interest. (They will not be able to access the full pool of de-identified data in the CancerLinQ database, which is available to participating practices.) The committee—comprised of practicing oncologists, including those from participating CancerLinQ practices; health outcomes researchers; patient advocates; and CancerLinQ’s medical director—will review requests based on their potential to improve patient care.

Big data has high potential to yield research discoveries. To highlight this type of research, ASCO has created the online-only journal JCO CCI, the newest offering in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) family.

In her introductory editorial, “Our Journey Begins, JCO CCI editor in chief Debra A. Patt, MD, MPH, MBA, discusses the power of informatics and the journal’s objective of bringing people together to help realize the promise of informatics.

In speaking of the potential that data can yield, Dr. Patt writes, “There is a future in which our information systems will help us deliver higher quality care with greater efficiency. Easy access to data will bring appropriate clinical trials and treatments to the point of care in real time. … Today we see goals of learning faster and smarter trials, tomorrow we will envision changing the behavior of patients and clinicians on the basis of what we learn and how we interact with the systems that support us. We will interact with health care differently.”

JCO CCI is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal that publishes clinically actionable research and important new clinical hypotheses based on biomedical informatics methods and processes applied to cancer-related electronic health record, registry, clinical trial, and omics data and information.

Along with Dr. Patt’s editorial, three other articles published on February 23:

JCO CCI will publish original research and reviews, editorials, and commentaries, all reporting on biomedical informatics studies relevant to cancer treatment, care delivery, outcomes, and prevention. The publication also seeks papers that advance the development, interpretation, and clinical application of cancer informatics research.

To submit a paper to JCO CCI, visit the publication’s online Editorial Manager® portal.

In the final post, we will discuss the latest news regarding CancerLinQ and how it is part of ASCO’s efforts to help practices prepare for the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) changes that go into effect in 2018.


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