Q&A with Sarah Cannon’s Andy Corts, Part 1: Defining a Cancer Data Model

When an individual is diagnosed with cancer, he or she goes from having a primary care physician to having a team of care providers, including nutritionists, surgeons, and radiologists. It can become overwhelming, to put it mildly. It’s precisely why Sarah Cannon, the Cancer Institute of HCA Healthcare, implemented a system of cancer navigators to help guide patients and their families by coordinating appointments, answering questions, and providing education. These cancer navigators, says CIO Andy Corts, “are our most precious resource.”

The challenge came in harnessing the data — which can be complicated in any area, but is infinitely more difficult in the “incredibly fragmented” oncology environment. Corts and his team have made it their key priority to combine data sets into a common warehouse and leverage analytics to be able to “view the entire patient journey.” In this interview, he talks about how they’ve been able to define a cancer data model, how they’re partnering with Digital Reasoning to automate manual processes and enable more personalized care, and the journey that brought him to HCA, and eventually, Sarah Cannon.

Chapter 1



* About Sarah Cannon (cancer service line for HCA’s 185 hospitals, managed services for 50 cancer centers, clinical trial platform)

* Managing data in an “incredibly fragmented” environment

* Foundation of a data warehouse & EMPI

* “We didn’t have a defined data model for cancer.”

* Acquiring GenoSpace to focus on personalized medicine – “It allows us to bring genomic data in and map it so we have one standard.”

* Challenges with clinical trials recruitment

* Working with Digital Reasoning on AI

* “Now we have a model that can read & flag it, so we can act upon all those diagnoses.”



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Bold Statements

All of those systems roll up to us and we have a common database for all cancer patients. We have a common infrastructure where we can see exactly what’s going on in all of our cancer centers at any one moment.

You can’t just choose an EMR. It can’t be an Epic. It can’t be a Cerner. It can’t be a Meditech, because the actual beam is controlled by the EMR, and that’s where all the data goes.

Through this investment with GenoSpace, we now have the ability to structure and manage genomic data, and we’ve seen tremendous increase in the ability to enroll patient to specific clinical trials for immunotherapy and targeted therapies. That is a significant capability.

That data is critical for us to grab, but it always came back to our EMR system in an unstructured way. And when it came back unstructured and we had to either launch navigation programs or reach out to primary care providers who had ordered the colonoscopy, we had to read through each pathology result or report to actually find the patient. It was an incredibly manual effort.

Gamble:  Thank you, Andy, for taking some time to speak with healthsystemCIO.

Corts:  My pleasure.

 

Gamble:  To start off, can you give a high-level overview of Sarah Cannon?

Corts:  Certainly. Sarah Cannon is the cancer service line for all of HCA, which is a massive organization with around 185 hospitals. Sarah Cannon is a subsidiary that manages the cancer service line for HCA. We have around 50 cancer centers for which we provide management services. We also have a clinical trial platform where we work with medical oncologists, whether it’s revenue cycle management, compliance, FDA management, or the IT platform that they plug into, to manage clinical trials. We manage entire enrollment process from end to end.

 

Gamble:  And there are different sites around the country and one overseas?

Corts:  Yes,