Pilot Subcommittees

With the evolution of cutting edge biomedical technology and the resultant explosion of data in healthcare, health delivery organizations across the country have struggled with the best way to integrate old with new and utilize the data in a meaningful manner. This often requires costly investments, organizational change management and new workflows, policies and procedures to assimilate technology and impact care. This offers unique challenges to community based healthcare organizations that experience multiple barriers to acquisition and implementation. NCCCP strives to explore these issues in the community based setting.

The NCCCP Information Technology (IT) subcommittee will initially work to establish a baseline assessment of existing Health Information Technology (HIT) systems, infrastructure and interfaces at the site level. Each site will then explore the NCI's Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG™) for the tools and practices that meet the organization's HIT needs. The organizations will then develop a roadmap for adopting caBIG™ open-source and commercially available systems to expand their technology portfolio in their institutions. Where existing HIT systems are in place, the sites will evaluate and plan how caBIG™ compatibility will be accomplished. These roadmaps will consider the unique barriers institutions may encounter in adoption and compatibility in the community setting and the change management issues that might exist.

The use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) opens broad new avenues for data intensive research in understanding cancer. The NCCCP IT Subcommittee will expand existing EHR implementations and explore new interfaces with pertinent HIT systems. The organizations will work with existing EHR vendors to establish plans to achieve caBIG™ compatibility.

Additional tasks this subcommittee will explore include:

• requirements for EHR systems in the community cancer center and community hospital settings
• requirements for patient interactions with EHR's
• privacy and data sharing issues surrounding EHR's