President’s Cancer Panel Report Recognizes ASCO’s Work in HIT Interoperability

Nov 28, 2016

In November, the President’s Cancer Panel released a report, “Improving Cancer-Related Outcomes with Connected Health,” which presents goals and recommendations to advance the use of connected health for cancer care. The report notes that the recommendations “are consistent with calls by the Institute of Medicine and ASCO to use health information technology (HIT) to improve the experience of cancer care for patients and providers.”1

Connected health refers to a health care delivery model that uses telehealth and telemedicine technologies to provide health services remotely. Telehealth, also referred to as telemedicine, is the use of electronic information and telecommunications technologies to support long-distance clinical health care, patient and professional health-related education, public health, and health administration.2

In making its case that electronic health records (EHR) should be used to enable the clinical oncology workforce to increase the “effective delivery of care across the cancer continuum,” the report cites an ASCO survey of oncology practices that showed how EHRs can work against this goal by worsening professional satisfaction. This survey showed that EHR use and implementation was “the most commonly cited practice pressure, outranking payer pressures, staffing issues, and drug pricing.” The panel then calls for greater effort to increase EHR utility and ensure that federal programs and health IT tools “support the oncology workforce as it strives to deliver the best possible care.”3

To achieve this and its other critical objectives, the report lists action items the panel identified that, if executed, “should enhance access to health information, support patient-centered cancer care and patient engagement, enhance the experience of providing care for physicians and other members of the oncology workforce, and accelerate progress in cancer research.”

The report applauds the Society’s role as the first organization to begin developing, in collaboration with interoperability experts and Health Level Seven International (HL7), an oncology-specific EHR standard. ASCO’s standard, the Clinical Oncology Treatment Plan and Summary (COTPS), is designed to improve the coordination and quality of care for cancer patients. The Society currently is integrating the COTPS with its survivorship care plan. Early work on the COTPS has focused on data elements needed to prepare treatment planning and summary documents for supporting communication and coordination of care during and after treatment for early-stage breast cancer and colon cancer.4 As a testament to ASCO’s forward-thinking and diligence in creating the standard, the COTPS is listed in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s 2016 Interoperability Standards Advisory.5

ASCO also is cited for its creation and use of a rapid learning healthcare system, the CancerLinQ® platform, to facilitate data integration and sharing to improve the quality of care and advance research. CancerLinQ® is operated by CancerLinQ LLC, a wholly owned nonprofit subsidiary of ASCO. The rapid learning system pulls in patient records from EHRs—there were one million records in the system as of mid-October—and analyzes these records to allow oncologists to uncover patterns and trends and measure their care against that of their peers and recommended guidelines, all with the goal of improving the quality of care for patients with cancer. As the CancerLinQ® database grows, there will be more opportunity to gain insights from the aggregated, de-identified patient data, potentially identifying treatment options and other information to strengthen the confidence of care decisions and filling gaps in the evidence base that supports quality cancer care.

The President’s Cancer Panel was established in 1971 and is charged with monitoring the progress of the National Cancer Program, which includes all public and private activities focused on preventing, detecting, and treating cancers and on cancer survivorship, as well as identifying barriers to effective implementation. The panel investigates topics important to the National Cancer Program for which actionable recommendations can be made. Information is collected through focused workshops and additional research, and findings and recommendations are compiled in reports to the president.

Read the full report.

 

References

  1. American Society of Clinical Oncology. The state of cancer care in America, 2016: a report by the American Society of Clinical Oncology. J Oncol Pract. 2016;12(4):339-83.
  2. Center for Connected Health Policy. What is telehealth? The National Telehealth Policy Research Center. cchpca.org/what-is-telehealth. Accessed on Nov. 21, 2016.
  3. American Society of Clinical Oncology. The state of cancer care in America, 2016: a report by the American Society of Clinical Oncology. J Oncol Pract. 2016;12(4):339-83.
  4. Warner JL, Maddux SE, Hughes KS, Krauss JC, Yu PP, Shulman LN, et al. Development, implementation, and initial evaluation of a foundational open interoperability standard for oncology treatment planning and summarization. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2015;22(3):577-86.
  5. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. 2016 interoperability standards advisory. Washington (DC): ONC; 2016. healthit.gov/sites/default/files/2016-interoperability-standards-advisory-final-508.pdf. Accessed on November 17, 2016.

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