(Recorded on March 19, 2013)

Summary:

Cancer researchers have struggled to integrate clinical, laboratory, and biospecimen data in ways that enable meaningful, rapid analytics. Data silos and complex, heterogeneous data types have made aggregating the necessary data expensive, labor intensive, and error prone. This significantly slows research initiatives and leaves researchers unable to analyze all of the data they need to recognize patterns in clinical data.

Dr. John Preskitt, Chief and Director of the Division of Surgical Oncology at Baylor Health Care System has led an initiative to solve these challenges with its Surgical Oncology Clinical Research Database (SOCRD). The SOCRD initiative links oncology registries together on a common, ontology-driven informatics platform developed by Remedy Informatics, Inc. This “meta-registry” enables clinicians to conduct rapid, iterative analysis of complete, validated oncology-related data sets without reliance on data warehouse IT staff or other external resources.

Join Dr. Preskitt and Dr. Michael Cummens, Chief Medical Officer at Remedy Informatics, for an in depth case study discussing Baylor’s approach to implement this cancer research informatics platform and how Baylor is using these new analytics capabilities to advance their research agenda.

Learning Objectives:

• See examples of real-time analytics, through data-visualization and “do it yourself” database queries clinicians can do themselves
• Learn about the growing importance of, and practical solutions for, integrating biospecimen, laboratory assay, and clinical data into research efforts
• Understand how ontology-driven registries enable researchers to aggregate, map and harmonize diverse, complex data sets
• Learn how to conduct cross-disease analytics with a “meta-registry” informatics approach

Speakers:

Dr. John Preskitt
Dr. Preskitt is a general surgeon in private practice at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, where the majority of his practice is in surgical oncology. He is an Attending Surgeon in the Department of Surgery where he is active in the teaching of surgical residents. He serves as Director of the Division of Surgical Oncology of the Department of Surgery and as its Medical Director. Dr. Preskitt is a past Regent of the American College of Surgeons. For the College he also serves as chair of the General Surgery Coding and Reimbursement Committee. He serves on the American College of Surgeons Health Policy and Advocacy Group, wherein he chairs the subcommittee on Appropriateness. He is past Chairman of the Medical Board of Baylor University Medical Center.

Dr. Michael Cummens
Dr. Cummens has a wide range of experience as a physician and a bioinformaticist working in medical ontology development, medical informatics, and electronic health record development. Prior to joining Remedy, Dr. Cummens was the Associate Chief Medical Information Officer at Marshfield Clinic, a nationally recognized leader in quality health care delivery. He worked as an IT Consultant for EMR and clinical informatics at Silver Dragon Consulting from 2005¬-2008. He served as Senior Director of Medical Informatics at Ascension Healthcare in St. Louis in 2005, and prior to that he was a Medical Informaticist at Intelligent Medical Objects in Northbrook, IL.

Dr. Cummens holds a medical degree from the University of Wisconsin and has more than twenty years of clinical experience in primary care. As a family practitioner he was an early adopter of clinical data management software; he built and implemented his own EMR system including a patient registry. Dr. Cummens is board certified in Family Medicine and is a member of the AAFP (American Academy of Family Physicians) and AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association).