ASCO: Electronic Health Records Will Improve Cancer Treatment

Use of electronic health records by oncologists, patients, and other members of the cancer treatment team will vastly improve the quality and continuity of cancer care, according to members of a recent American Society of Clinical Oncology Roundtable, who are taking active steps to encourage Society members to embrace the technology.

The January 23-24 EHR roundtable, the first in ASCO’s history, underscores the Society’s opinion of “the growing need for EHR systems to improve patient care, [to] help oncologists streamline workflow, increase patient and provider satisfaction, create more complete documentation, reduce errors, and reduce costs associated with traditional transcription and paper records.”

Templates for oncologists to create a comprehensive chemotherapy treatment plan for patients—the core elements being a treatment plan and treatment summary—have been available for download at the ASCO website for some time. But members of ASCO’s EHR roundtable are urging their members to go one step further by actively “promoting integration of the treatment plan and summaries into oncology electronic health records.”

Technology specialists who create EHR programs were also invited to the two-day roundtable and were invited to participate in future meetings. There will be an “EHR Vendor Lab” at ASCO’s annual meeting in Chicago this June, for example, and an “EHR Vendor Challenge” later this year. The “Vendor Challenge”, ASCO officials hope, will allow “oncologists and their staff will be able to try out and rate oncology-specific EHRs that the vendors are developing.”

Several large cancer treatment centers have already made EHRs part of their operations, as detailed in a 2005 National Cancer Institute report. Some patients at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, for example, report the side effects of their chemotherapy treatments from their home computers via Internet to the hospital. Reports are sent to the individual’s EHR, making it easier for oncologists and other members of the treatment team to access in ‘real time’ and allow them to make quicker adjustments to the patient’s treatment. The EHRs of Dana-Farber patients also include laboratory data, pathology and radiology results, medications and infusion flow sheets for chemotherapy and blood products which are shared with other institutions Dana-Farber works with as part of the patient’s comprehensive care plan.

In another example, according to the NCI report, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s EHR system, “ClinicStation”, has virtually eliminated paper charts. “Patients at MD Anderson all receive multidisciplinary care, where routinely several physicians are involved in the management of a patient's care plan at the same time,” Dr. Kevin W. McEnery, MD Anderson’s associate division head for informatics says. “With ClinicStation, these physicians can efficiently collaborate in a patient's care because they have simultaneous access to the same information.”

The United Stated Department of Health and Human Services wants all US citizens to have an electronic health record by 2015 as part of a larger plan to streamline healthcare, especially among Medicare and Medicaid patients, and reduce costly, sometimes fatal, medical errors. But a large number of medical professionals, including oncologists, are apprehensive to convert traditional paper records over to electronic systems, citing barriers such as prohibitive upfront costs and the lack of a universal platform to easily exchange data from one colleague to another.

Diane West, a frequent contributor to the MDNG and OncNG family of journals, is a freelance medical writer based in Manhattan. For more information on the EHR Roundtable, e-mail practice@asco.org.