Jonathan Hirsch on Making Data Usable for Oncologists at the Point of Care

Oncology care is often spread out across multiple facilities and providers, so health information technology (IT) innovators use software to integrate data from these many locations and deliver it to the point of care, according to Jonathan Hirsch, founder and president of Syapse.

Transcript (slightly modified)

How can health IT be used to transform oncology care?

Oncology is an incredibly complex domain, and it involves many different providers who may be at different practices, different health systems. It involves not just the medical professionals but it also involves supportive care, like care coordinators, navigators, et cetera. And with oncology, you have this interesting dynamic where the care is highly longitudinal, it’s spread out across multiple facilities, and having access to the right information at the right point in time is truly the way to make progress in the fight against cancer.

So that’s really the job of software. It’s to bring all the information together and make it usable for the provider of oncology care to help that patient. When we think about how we use software to appropriately direct care and help in the fight against cancer, it’s really bringing the right information to the right person at the right point in time, but also having robust outcomes tracking capability so that the providers are not operating in isolation. You want to help the providers learn from the experiences of every other cancer case and every other provider facility.

One of the things that we’ve done to achieve this vision is we’ve partnered with a number of leading health systems, Intermountain, Stanford, and Providence Health & Services, to launch the Oncology Precision Network. This is an effort to use software and large data sets to really fight cancer by bringing the aggregate data and learnings from that network to the point of care, and this wouldn’t be possible without a robust software platform.