Moffitt’s Health And Research Informatics Platform Drives Better Outcomes
The Information Age is a period characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely and to have instant access to information that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously.
The Moffitt statement - “Closer to our patients, closer to a cure®” - may mean different things to different people.
To Dana Rollison, Ph.D., vice president and chief health information officer, one interpretation could be that the new wealth of information Moffitt gathers on every consenting patient through its data-driven Health and Research Informatics (HRI) Platform brings Moffitt scientists, clinicians and caregivers closer to patients so that the information can be put to good use in the quest for better patient outcomes.
“Moffitt’s Health and Research Informatics platform is a state-of-the-art, enterprise-wide data warehouse built in collaboration with Oracle, a technology solutions company,” explains Dr. Rollison. Deloitte, also a Moffitt partner, leveraged its “data factory” of 24/7 programmers while TransMed provided a “front-end” query tool for Moffitt researchers, explains Dr. Rollison. “The information we gather and process through HRI includes demographics, clinical information on cancer diagnosis, stage, treatment and outcomes, lifestyle factors that may influence cancer risk and prognosis, and biobanking information detailing the biology of their tumor.”
To gather data, HRI links data from many different sources, including the intake forms that consenting new patients fill out through the Patient Portal, a “click here” place on the Moffitt website where patients can access their personal health and treatment information.
“That first phase of HRI went ‘live’ in October of 2011,” says Dr. Rollison. “Phase II went live in August of 2012 and includes information from Moffitt’s 17 consortium sites participating in the Total Cancer Care® program. Now we can see the whole network and simultaneously tap into the clinical data from the cancer registry, patient consent information and the biobanking tumor information gathered from patients who have donated tumor tissues.”
Moffitt’s Total Cancer Care® protocol is a national research study open at Moffitt and at partnering institutions throughout Florida and