Electronic Health Records (EHRs): Supporting ASCO's Vision of Cancer Care

Abstract

ASCO's vision for cancer care in 2030 is built on the expanding importance of panomics and big data, and envisions enabling better health for patients with cancer by the rapid transformation of systems biology knowledge into cancer care advances. This vision will be heavily dependent on the use of health information technology for computational biology and clinical decision support systems (CDSS). Computational biology will allow us to construct models of cancer biology that encompass the complexity of cancer panomics data and provide us with better understanding of the mechanisms governing cancer behavior. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality promotes CDSS based on clinical practice guidelines, which are knowledge bases that grow too slowly to match the rate of panomic-derived knowledge. CDSS that are based on systems biology models will be more easily adaptable to rapid advancements and translational medicine. We describe the characteristics of health data representation, a model for representing molecular data that supports data extraction and use for panomic-based clinical research, and argue for CDSS that are based on systems biology and are algorithm-based.KEY POINTSASCO's vision for cancer care emphasizes the roles of panomic data and big data.Realizing this vision will require health information technology systems that can capture and represent panomic data in a manner that retains data meaning and allows data extraction and use.Panomic data can be used to facilitate clinical research.Clinical decision support systems can use panomic data to guide treatment selection and precision medicine.The evolution of electronic health records will need to consider the rising role of panomic data in health care and research.