Only 3 percent of adult cancer patients participate in clinical trials, limiting access to high-quality data across multiple types of cancers. To address this and other interoperability issues, MITRE has developed a SMART on FHIR application that takes advantage of a new standard for collecting minimal common oncology data elements from EHRs.
With leadership from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), mCODE is a data standard under development that MITRE said would facilitate breakthrough insights into high-quality data for multiple cancer use cases.
Unveiled at HIMSS19 in Orlando, the open source Compass is a SMART (substitutable medical applications and reusable technologies) on FHIR (fast healthcare interoperability resources) application that extracts mCODE data elements from EHRs to deliver reports to providers and patients.
“Advancements in cancer care and research are being driven by high-quality, sharable data,” said Brian Anderson, M.D., chief clinical lead at MITRE, in a prepared statement. “Whereas mCODE is a standardized set of cancer data points within health records, Compass is a tool that extracts that data, organizes, and informs doctors, patients, and researchers.”
Most of the nearly 15 million individuals living with cancer in the U.S. have data in EHRs of some kind, MITRE noted, but there are more than 1,500 often incompatible EHR systems in use, dramatically limiting the valuable information cancer researchers need.
ASCO is working with MITRE and other stakeholders, to improve data and records interoperability in oncology care and research. An early version of mCODE core elements, reflecting initial use cases, is open for comment and near ready for publication.
MITRE and Brigham and Women’s Hospital plan to run an mCODE implementation pilot at the Boston hospital. Teams are exploring the potential for a research study to demonstrate the benefit of structured data entry, capture, and display for front-line clinicians.
“We’re proud to collaborate with Brigham and Women’s to seek potential opportunities to pilot the use of mCODE in a clinical research setting,” said Andre Quina, principal investigator at MITRE, in a statement. “Providers and patients are already discussing the most important information related to care and we want to ensure, through trial, that we are capturing the right data, at the right times, to drive the best possible cancer research and treatment.”
