Dr Edmondo Robinson Highlights the Importance of a Complete Patient View When Delivering Care

Everything from the genomic data for the cancer to the zip code of a patient matters when delivery care, said Edmondo Robinson, MD, MBA, MS, FACP, senior vice president and chief digital officer at Moffitt Cancer Center.

Transcript

How is Moffitt trying to get a more complete view of a patient to deliver care?

So, the approach to getting a complete view of a person is multifaceted. There's just there's so many components to it. It's your traditional clinical data, lab imaging, you know, all of those, all those components as well.

But I think about it, I think about it from—let's go from the micro, from the genomic, and then work our way out. So, again, it's oncology. So genomic data is pretty standard. But when you think about it, so one, it's not just the genomic data for the cancer itself, but it's a genomic data for the human being. Right? Then you start thinking about what is the micro environment around the cancer? And actually, there's ways to mathematically model some of that, there’s ways to think about that in terms of radiation therapy. So now, you went from the tumor, from the genomic tumor, and now you kind of have a microbiome.

Now, who's this human being? What are all their comorbidities? So, let's think about them as a as a physiologic human being. And then you expand even further, and you say, wait a minute, what are all the external influences on them? Some of it’s behaviors. Some of it’s where they're situated within a social construct, right? So, we think about social determinants of health, because race itself is a social construct—it has less real relevance from a genomic perspective, more relevance from a social perspective. But it matters—it actually does affect outcomes.

So you can take a particular individual, go from their genetic code, all the way out to their zip code. And in that’s what gets you a much more complete picture of a human being. And now we have to understand what do we do with all those inputs? What is their zip code? How does their zip code matter? It's actually a proxy for lots of other stuff. How do their comorbidities influence, you know, outcomes? And so how does their social media activity? How does their family structure? How do all those things matter?

They do matter. We haven't paid as much attention to those components, but they do matter, and they may matter more the matter more than what we have been paying attention to. Right? So, we've actually got to pull those data in and allow those data to drive our interventions and drive our value and outcomes for the patient as much as we allow the genetic data, for example.