HEALTH IT: Redrawing the Cancer War Battle Plan

Hundreds of thousands of patients undergo cancer treatment each year, using all sorts of combinations of drugs and treatments and therapies. Not all are in clinical trials—but many of them have something to teach us. We linked to Gooznews touching on this topic a few months ago. Now Merrill Goozner has a longer analysis at Science Progress of how, in part because of advances in health IT, we could tap this untapped pool of knowledge:

A redrawn battle plan—one that focuses on turning the treatment system into a research and learning system that can teach oncologists the best use of the weapons they already have—is long overdue...

…Many of the nation’s 30,000 oncologists are engaged in what could be described as an unobserved and uncontrolled science experiment, especially when it comes to treating the 560,000 Americans who die each year from the more than 100 forms of the disease. As these patients’ cancers advance, their physicians try regimens they read about in journals or hear about from colleagues. The outcomes are never gathered. The data is never analyzed. And the findings are never disseminated.’

 

 

 

The economic stimulus package should help us expand our use of HIT. Goozner says we also have to encourage doctors and scientists to be more accepting of retrospective analysis of treatment data, not just the proverbial gold standard of double-blind clinical trials. But we should be able to harvest some of that knowledge and disseminate findings much more quickly than we do today. The National Cancer Institute has already begun creating that learning system through the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, known as caBIG. The goal: not just broad findings about this drug or that, but fine analysis of which subgroups of dozens of kinds of cancers respond best to which specific treatments or combination of treatments. And rather than limiting and impersonalizing choices, this could move us toward “personalized” medicine.