This is the second 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: "CancerLinQ: A Natural Extension of ASCO's Mission."

A commitment to high-quality care is a cornerstone of ASCO’s mission, “Conquering cancer through research, education, and promotion of the highest quality patient care.”

ASCO is exemplifying this focus on quality through the creation and development of its CancerLinQ^® platform, which will harness the power of big data to deliver high-quality care to patients with cancer. The goal for CancerLinQ is to allow oncology care providers to improve the quality and value of care by analyzing millions of medical records from patients with cancer, uncovering patterns and trends, and measuring their care against that of their peers and recommended guidelines.

To date, CancerLinQ, which went live in February 2016, has more than 75 participating practices across a broad range of care settings and geographic distribution that are actively or in the process of contributing data.

CancerLinQ builds on existing quality improvement programs from ASCO, which practices can take advantage of to help ensure they are providing the best care possible to patients:

• Guidelines: Clinical practice guidelines serve as a guide for doctors and outline appropriate methods of treatment and care. They can address specific clinical situations (disease-oriented) or use of approved medical products, procedures, or tests (modality-oriented). Each year, ASCO reviews guideline topic proposals from ASCO members. Those are developed, published, and regularly reviewed for their currency and validity. ASCO’s first guideline, which focused on the use of hematopoietic colony-stimulating factors, was published in 1994.
• Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI^®): QOPI is an oncologist-led, practice-based quality assessment program designed to promote excellence in cancer care by helping practices create a culture of self-examination and improvement. ASCO debuted the program to its members in 2006. QOPI provides a standard methodology, a robust library of quality metrics for oncology, and a collection tool to reliably and routinely assess care, inform quality improvement activities, and demonstrate quality to patients and external stakeholders. QOPI users also are well-positioned to meet external reporting requirements for payers and the government and participate in new payment models focused on quality.
• QOPI^® Certification Program: This program, launched in January 2010, provides a 3-year certification for outpatient hematology-oncology practices. The program validates processes that demonstrate a practice’s commitment to quality to patients, payors, and the medical community. The primary mission of the QOPI Certification process is practice improvement. Benchmarking performance against performance thresholds can assist practitioners in achieving specific improvement goals.
• Quality Training Program: Launched in October 2013, this program is designed to train oncology health care providers to investigate and implement data-driven quality improvement and manage clinical and administrative processes and outcomes. The comprehensive 6-month program brings oncology teams together to create and facilitate an improvement project. Each team selects a project that will solve a problem in its own clinical setting, so the learning experience is simultaneously fostering a solution or best practice.

Learn more about ASCO’s Quality and Guidelines programs.

In the next post, we discuss how CancerLinQ was created, what it is, and what it does.