Using real world data to advance the provision of supportive cancer care: mucositis as a case study
Wardill, Hannah R., Sonis, Steve T., Blijlevens, Nicole M.A.
Current Opinion in Supportive and Palliative Care: September 2022 – Volume 16 – Issue 3 – p 161-167
For decades, clinical decision making and practice has been largely informed by data generated through randomized clinical trials (RCTs). By design, RCTs are highly restricted in both scope and scale, resulting in narrow indications and iterative advances in clinical practice.
With the transition to electronic health records, there are now endless opportunities to utilize these ‘real world’ data (RWD) to make more substantive advances in our understanding that are, by nature, more applicable to reality. MASCC members Hannah Wardill, Steve Sonis and Nicole Blijlevens published a review on this topic in the September issue of Current Opinion in Supportive and Palliative Care discussing the current paradigm of using big data to advance and inform the provision of supportive cancer care, using mucositis as a case study.
The authors found that global efforts to synthesize RWD in cancer have almost exclusively focused on tumor classification and treatment efficacy. Extending this work to treatment side effects is more complex, and requires integration of both clinical and biological data, as well as patient-reported outcomes. Multidisciplinary cooperation and leadership are needed to improve data collection and governance to ensure the right data is accessible and reliable.
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