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Oncology (ASCO) announced
January 21, 2015,1 that it would
use the SAP HANA platform to develop
CancerLinQ, the revolutionary health
information technology (HIT) project in
which physicians are banding together
to improve cancer care delivery.
The American Society of Clinical
“In teaming with SAP, we found an ideal
company with state-of-
the-art technology, a
commitment to invest
major new resources,
and a clear dedication
to our patient care mission,”
ASCO president
Peter Paul Yu, MD, FACP,
FASCO, said in a statement.
“With our cancer
expertise complemented
by SAP’s software and
technical insights, CancerLinQ
is in a position to
make a huge leap toward
becoming the platform of
choice for oncologists.”1
CancerLinQ is an effort to transform
the cancer care decision-making process
by securely gathering real-world data on
cancer patients in 1 place, giving clinicians
immediate high-quality feedback
and support for decision making. When
CancerLinQ is up and running, clinicians
in the field will be able to get personalized
feedback on patients based on the
most up-to-date findings, the type of information
that was previously unavailable
in many settings.
Journal of Managed Care, Yu described
how CancerLinQ would eventually collect
data across hundreds of providers
and thousands of patients and thus help
avoid the bias that can be present in
small sample sizes.2
In a previous interview with The American
“CancerLinQ will allow us to amass
this data, aggregate it and
analyze it, and then learn
from that,” he explained.
“If that is then married
to clinical decision support,
so that information
is returned to the doctor
at the point of care, it
will allow the physician
to more rapidly consider
choices and make better
treatment decisions.”
2
doctor and patient a data-
driven “second opinion,”
derived not from a
few dozen similar cases
presented to a single physician or practice,
but from thousands of similar cases
involving hundreds of physicians.
The idea is to give both
the world for helping clinicians use technology
to improve cancer diagnosis and
treatment through flexible, multi-purpose
in-memory data management and
applications. Its advanced capabilities
include predictive text analytics, spatial
processing, and data virtualization on
the same architecture. Among the users
of SAP HANA is the National Center for
SAP HANA has a track record around
which uses real-time data analytics to
help accelerate cancer research and improve
clinical trial matching. In Japan,
SAP has teamed with Mitsui Knowledge
Industry, trimming the time for an individual
patient’s genomic analysis for
cancer diagnosis from 30 days to 20 minutes.
Tumor Diseases in Heidelberg, Germany, 1
for some time, across the tenure of several
ASCO presidents. During a March
2013 demonstration in Washington, DC,
then—ASCO president elect Cliff Hudis,
CancerLinQ has been in development
someday be able to analyze the electronic
medical records of millions of cancer
patients, find those with characteristics
similar to his own patient, and determine
how others fared with therapy options,
using nothing more than a simple
desktop computer. That scenario seemed
far off at the time, but now versions of
CancerLinQ will be ready in late 2015.1,3
MD, showed how an oncologist would
States have signed agreements to provide
patient records for the first version
of CancerLinQ, and 7 more will soon join,
which means 500,000 patient records
will populate the first version of the program.
1 Practices providing data represent
both major cancer centers and community
practices, ensuring an array of data.
Eight oncology practices in the United
technologies, CancerLinQ will
drive development of the platform with
input from physicians, patients, and experts
in related disciplines such as quality
improvement, epidemiology, and HIT.
While SAP will provide access to customized EBO
References
to develop CancerLinQ [press release].
Alexandria, VA: American Society of Clinical Oncology;
January 21, 2015. http://www.asco.org/
advocacy/asco-teams-multinational-softwarecorporation-
sap-develop-cancerlinq%E2%84%A2.
1. ASCO teams with multinational software corporation
aggregating patient, doctor data. AJMC
website. http://www.ajmc.com/ajmc-tv/interviews/
ASCO-President-Dr-Yu-Discusses-Aggregating-
Patient-Doctor-Data. Published September
25, 2014. Accessed January 21, 2015.
2. Beagin N. ASCO President Dr Peter Yu discusses
on CancerLinQ [press release]. Alexandria, VA:
American Society of Clinical Oncology; March
27, 2013. Galieo Analytics website. http://www.
galileoanalytics.com/galileo-cosmos-featured-inasco-
briefing-on-cancerlinq/.
3. Galileo Cosmos featured in ASCO briefing