Intermountain Healthcare, Stanford Cancer Institute, Providence Health & Services, and Syapse joined together to announce a new consortium to advance cancer care through data sharing and increase access to clinical trials. Responding to Vice President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative, the Oncology Precision Network (OPN) will share aggregated clinical, molecular, and treatment data through an advanced software platform, rapidly bringing the most promising treatment insights to cancer patients and physicians.
This collaboration between two of the nation’s largest not-for-profit health systems, one of the country’s premiere academic research centers, and Syapse, a precision medicine software company, aims to find breakthroughs in cancer care by leveraging previously untapped real-world cancer data while preserving privacy, security, and data rights.
The OPN members anticipate an immediate 100,000 data sets in the OPN database. When fully implemented, the OPN will impact 50,000 new cancer patients per year, representing three percent of the nation’s total; 200,000 total cancer patients per year; and have more than 1.5 million historical cancer cases. The OPN consortium comprises data and physicians across 11 states, 79 hospitals and 800 clinics. The consortium hopes to include other health systems later in the year, with the long-term goal of impacting cancer care across the United States.
“This consortium exists because we all arrived at the same important conclusion: we need to collaborate across health systems to cure cancer,” said Dr. Lincoln Nadauld, executive director of Intermountain Precision Genomics. “Through collaboration, we emphasize the need to learn together to empower physicians and patients in finding solutions to cancer without increasing costs.”
“The highest quality cancer care is predicated on clinical trial participation and currently very few cancer patients can access trials that are matched based on the genetic make-up of their cancer,” said Dr. Thomas Brown, executive director of the Swedish Cancer Institute and co-chair Providence Health & Services Personalized Medicine Program. “This partnership will further our efforts to provide customized therapies that are based on the biological features of both the patient and their unique cancer.”
“This dynamic network will also allow us to approach precision oncology from a ‘big data’ point of view,” said Dr. Jim Ford, associate professor of Medicine (Oncology) and Genetics at Stanford and director of Clinical Cancer Genomics at the Stanford Cancer Institute. “By aggregating all of our real patient experiences, we will rapidly expand our ability to learn how to choose the best targeted treatments for our cancer patients based on the molecular profile of their tumor and our informatics based research.”
Individually, each of the health care organizations have been storing invaluable information about patients’ health history, cancer status, labs, molecular and genetic data, and treatments, allowing physicians to provide the right kind of treatment at the right time. Collectively, the OPN will use the Syapse technology to link aggregated data between the geographically disparate health systems. This work allows the OPN consortium to increase inter-operability of data sharing, empowering physicians with information that would previously have been unavailable.
“Through the OPN, we are leading the way in the clinical implementation of precision medicine, turning the Cancer Moonshot’s vision of improved cancer care into a reality for patients in the community,” said Jonathan Hirsch, Syapse founder and president. “Our work has demonstrated that precision medicine improves survival and reduces costs. We believe that precision medicine will be the core enabling technology for health systems to transform to at-risk, value-based care.”
The OPN consortium builds on prior work by each of the parties, including a study of the clinical effectiveness of precision medicine by Intermountain Healthcare and Syapse. This study demonstrated a doubling of progression free survival without increasing the cost of care in stage 4 patients. Additionally, Providence, through Swedish Cancer Institute, developed a sophisticated algorithm to match patients with clinical trials most likely to benefit their “molecular type” of cancer.
