In a potential big advancement for oncology treatment and information sharing, several leading electronic health record vendors this week made voluntary commitment to adopt the United States Core Data for Interoperability Plus Cancer, or USCDI+ Cancer, a recommended minimum set of key cancer-related data elements to be included in a patient’s EHR.
They’ve also pledged to support the necessary data elements for a new cancer care payment model developed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
WHY IT MATTERS
The Cancer Moonshot Initiative, which was first launched in 2016 and then resurrected in 2022, is a multipronged effort that aims to lower costs and improve patient care and outcomes for cancer patients and requires EHRs to embrace interoperability and new data standards.
According to Tuesday’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy blog, in coordination with the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, the National Institutes of Health, CMS and the Cancer Moonshot, the group of EHR developers voluntarily committed to adopting data elements that cover vital information about a person’s treatment history, test results and disease status to improve data sharing by healthcare providers.
The Administration said that adoption by Epic, Oracle Health, Meditech, athenahealth, Flatiron, Ontada, ThymeCare and CVS Health EHRs will improve care coordination for people facing cancer nationwide, especially in rural and underserved areas. Standardizing data across the EHRs also opens new possibilities for faster research results and more effective public health interventions, OSTP also noted in a blog post.
Because the EOM data elements also form the core of USCDI+ Cancer, a recommended minimum set of key cancer-related data elements to be included in a patient’s EHR, the Administration said it is calling upon the entire healthcare ecosystem to support national health information exchange.
THE LARGER TREND
Health data and research have for too long been trapped in silos, former President Barrack Obama noted in January 2016, when he announced the Cancer Moonshot in his final State of the Union Address – and appointed then Vice President Joe Biden to lead it.
At the time, he said only 5% of cancer patients in the U.S. ended up in a clinical trial.
“Most aren’t given access to their own data,” Obama said. “At the same time, community oncologists – who treat more than 75% of cancer patients – have limited access to cutting-edge research and advances.”
That number has gone up, according to research published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in 2021.
By 2020, “at least 25.4% of adult cancer patients were estimated to participate in one or more cancer clinical research studies,” the researchers said, concluding that based on enrollment data from the Commission on Cancer, “enrollment to cancer treatment trials was 6.3%, higher than historical estimates of
Source : Healthcare IT News