Researchers at the University of Utah https://healthcare.utah.edu, Intermountain Healthcare https://intermountainhealthcare.org, and the Huntsman Cancer Institute www.huntsmancancer.org, recently received a grant for $3.8 million from the National Cancer Institute www.cancer.gov (NCI) to develop an advanced cancer screening tool.
The new tool will couple EHR technologies with advanced Clinical Decision Support (CDS) tools to screen for several types of cancer. The research team will study how to identify and manage high risk patients within primary care settings and in the broader care delivery system.
Increased scientific evidence supports individualizing cancer screening based on risk to better predict probabilities for cancer development. However, researchers are challenged by significant barriers to implementing an effective CDS tool.
The problems in developing the CDS tool is that some EHR systems have limited clinical decision support capabilities, there is minimal sharing of CDS rules among healthcare organizations, and existing CDS systems rely on closed architectures.
“The goal of the CDS project is to enable a standards-based and scalable CDS platform for individualized cancer screening to be used across healthcare organizations” reports the project’s Principal Investigators Guilherme Del Fiol MD, PhD and Kensaku Kawamoto, MD, PhD both Assistant Professors of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah Health.
Working with primary care physicians, oncologists, and genetic counselors, researchers are going to develop CDS algorithms and interventions to support individualized screening of breast and colorectal cancer using two modalities.
The University of Utah Health and Intermountain will consult on how to develop the CDS platform and workflow and then demonstrate how it can work in their care delivery systems. Intermountain plans to evaluate the solution against their care delivery system to show that the application and workflow are transferable to other organizations and their EHRs.