An organization that produces clinical practice guidelines in oncology will provide its cancer biomarkers compendium for use with a software platform used in precision medicine.
The National Comprehensive Cancer Network said Thursday that it had entered a partnership with San Francisco-based Syapse designed to augment health information technology around cancer care, with the software company using the NCCN Biomarkers Compendium for clinical care.
Data from the compendium will begin appearing on the Syapse platform starting later this year. The non-profit NCCN comprises 27 cancer centers and is based in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. Oncologists use its NCCN Guidelines to guide clinical decision making, while insurance companies often use them as a reference for reimbursement of drugs used off-label. Syapse’s client base includes several health systems across the country that use its software to guide precision medicine in oncology.
The group has been trying to work with technology vendors to incorporate its clinical decision-making support into physicians’ normal workflow, said C. Lyn Fitzgerald, the NCCN’s senior vice president for US and global development, in a phone interview. For example, when physicians get information a genomic sequencing test, they have to look at the results in a report to see how it relates to clinical practice guidelines, whereas Syapse’s software incorporates it into a computer interface so that it’s within the workflow, she said.
The Biomarkers Compendium is designed to identify cancer driver mutations for which there may be effective approved drugs or clinical trials available. Incorporating the compendium data into the Syapse platform would thus allow physicians to counsel patients on the availability of trials in addition to identifying drugs that may respond to biomarkers, Fitzgerald said.
As such, if a mutation is identified, Syapse’s system uses the NCCN compendium to provide decision support based on what is recommended in the guidelines, Fitzgerald said. “So it really will improve the efficiency of decision making so the provider has time with the patient,” she said. Given the focus as of late on the cost of healthcare, particularly cancer care, collaboration that enables identifying the right treatments at the right time for patients is important, she added.
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