Bobby Green: Data Utilization Crucial in Choosing Methods of Effective Care

By continuing to gather data on specific genomic data and profiles, we can heighten knowledge of applied treatment information on patient conditions, said Bobby Green, MD, chief medical officer at Flatiron.

Transcript

Is Flatiron also working to better analyze and recognize when a patient’s condition is getting worse based on real-world data included in the EHR?

One of the problems we have, and I think this gets back to the power of real-world data, is, right now when we treat a cancer patient, for most of our therapies the cancer treatment works in some percentage of patients and it doesn’t work in another percentage of patients. Most of the time we don’t know how to identify patients who are going to respond to therapy or not respond to therapy. At the same time, during their routine care, we’re collecting an enormous number of factors. Clinical factors in their data—maybe genomic data, maybe their genomic profiles—understanding what those genomic profiles of the tumors are, and then with real-world data we can understand, when do patients respond and when do patients not respond. So, pooling together that data, whether it’s your typical retrospective data or whether it’s doing prospective data, and think about, how do we collect genomic data or other information prospectively. Once you have that and you can put it together, you can start to say—what are the patterns that we see in patients who respond, what are the patterns we see in patients who don’t respond—and then use that information, ultimately, to help clinicians at the point-of-care understand who they should be treating with certain agents.

In your work with Flatiron and community oncologists, in what ways have you seen how community oncology is taking these different tools and essentially be at the forefront of innovation for giving quality care to patients?

So, 1 of the amazing things about community oncology practices is they serve a bunch of different functions or a bunch of different needs. First of all, they’re in the communities where most people live so they give patients this convenience that you can’t always get. I think most importantly, what’s really exciting about most community oncology practices is whether they’re small practices or large practices they all tend to have an entrepreneurial spirit to them, and what’s that translated into is really innovating and coming up with new and interesting ideas on how to deliver better care for patients and we see that in a whole variety of areas. I think the most notable is when we think about value-based care and alternative payment models, community oncology has really led the space both from the standpoint of thought leadership and how we’ve sort of thought about and developed a lot of these plans, but also in participation and influence at the highest levels of government. So, if you think about the Oncology Care Model, which is Medicare’s value-based care program, the major driving influences in that in a lot of ways are a variety of community oncology practices—big practices and small practices. So, I think ultimately, it’s that entrepreneurial spirit within community oncology practices and their flexibility that have allowed them to really innovate in a variety of areas in the space.