As vice president, Joe Biden launched the Cancer moonshot with the intention of accelerating progress in cancer treatments and accessibility, and as president, Biden relaunched the Moonshot Last year.
Earlier this year, as part of the Moonshot, the Department of Health and Human Services launched CancerXa public-private partnership to drive cancer innovation in the United States
THE Digital Medicine Society (Dime) And Moffitt Cancer Center CancerX co-host, and Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of DiMe, spoke with MobiHealthNews to discuss the current status of the initiative and what lies ahead regarding further adoption of digital health solutions within the Accelerator.
MobiHealthNews: What is the current status of the CancerX initiative?
Jennifer Goldsack: My goodness, so this is an incredibly exciting time.
In the second year of the Moonshot relaunch, we were able to sort of announce our projects with DiMe and Moffitt as co-hosts and the public-private partnership structure in late March. We announced our first members to ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology).
Next week, we will release our first set of resources from our project focused on using digital technologies to address financial toxicity and equity issues in cancer care and research. This project is therefore absolutely ahead of schedule.
We have a data sprint that we are working on in partnership with our ONC colleagues (Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology) and CMMI (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation). Thus, CMMI has a payment pilot project, the oncology improvement model that it is launching. This is the first time they are running a pilot where the claims data they need will be provided via an FHIR API.
We’re also thinking about how we can harness the power of the public-private partnership model to ensure that these data elements not only serve the purposes of the payment pilot, but create future real-world data sets that we can actually use. to boost cancer research. All these conclusions, which were a real sprint between the community and the government, will be announced on December 15 during the ONC annual meeting. So it’s operational.
Next week, we will announce the focus areas of our inaugural accelerator, in which we will promote five thematic areas.
There’s just tremendous momentum, and that’s based on the visits that we’ve actually had with the entire CancerX community. We spent two days in Washington at the beginning of September. So we had a membership meeting, the steering committee then met with members of the White House administration and we talked about how CancerX, which is the Moonshot initiative exclusively charged with harnessing the power of Digital innovation to achieve the Moonshot goals could not only advance our own work and mission, but also support the 17 other Moonshot initiatives.
I think this data sprint is a fantastic example of what happens when we look at all of the cancer-related activities across the federal government and combine that with industry best practices. So there’s a lot to be excited about there.
The other timely item that I think is important is that I’m participating in the President’s panel on cancer on Thursday and Friday of this week. The focus is on reducing inequities in cancer care and, in particular, leveraging technology to improve patient navigation.
Patient navigation is a particularly important issue for First Lady Dr. Jill Biden. There’s a whole two-day segment on this, and we’ll first look at the data we’ve been working on regarding financial toxicity and equity.
And what I will tell you, what our data tells us, is that there is enormous potential for digital solutions intentionally developed to address the unacceptable state of equity in cancer care, even by compared to the inequalities we see in other therapeutic areas. It’s worse, and it’s more amplified in cancer, and the same with financial toxicity.
This is not acceptable, and we have real-world data that shows these digital solutions can be a powerful force toward a more equitable and less harmful future after a cancer diagnosis. So we’re excited about that.
MHN: What digital solutions are you looking for regarding future partnerships that CancerX may yet need to bring together?
Bag of gold: We currently have over 150 member organizations, so I think the solutions we’ve presented are really very interesting. We’re discussing this with our colleagues in the community and also within the federal government, and it actually came out of the discussion at the White House, which is about defining a new model of care that combines decision support clinic with virtual first aid approaches. Thus, augmented telehealth and digital navigation to reimagine how we care for someone after a cancer diagnosis.
Currently we are working with the project team on scoping. What are the targeted diagnoses? What are the special populations and care settings in which we might want to test this? But these are the three technologies that we plan to implement as a large-scale demonstration project next year to show people, not just tell them, that when we use these tools and technologies to reimagine what care looks like, we may have a fundamentally different view. experience for patients, their care partners, the incredibly hardworking doctors who care for them, and we can achieve dramatically better and fairer outcomes at a more affordable cost. All of this is coming together, and those three technologies are virtual care approaches, clinical decision support, and digital navigation.
MHN: COVID-19 has highlighted the need for public-private partnerships. Why has it been so valuable, specifically for the CancerX initiative, to have these partnership models?
Bag of gold: The data sprint is a great example of this. We have been able to take innovative and ongoing government initiatives and scale them up so that industry can capitalize on the positive externalities of these created data sets in order to create a public good, a reusable data set that can be used and reused for answer the questions we ask ourselves. I’ve never been able to ask the question before about cancer. This work was in progress anyway. It was championed for another purpose, another vehicle for improving cancer care within the federal government.
By being aware of this, the industry was able to identify an opportunity for an increased value proposition that we are absolutely certain will be seized by the industry to improve cancer research and outcomes. downstream care.
This is a perfect example of how we can derive tremendous value from work in progress. There is an incredible amount of research out there. There is a tremendous amount of investment and, frankly, passion going into finding treatments and cures for people with cancer. There is a lot of work to do.
The public-private partnership model ensures that every time we make the decision to engage in a body of work, whether within industry or the federal government, we examine it from all angles to obtain the best return and that when we consider launching an initiative, we are convinced that we have minimized the opportunity cost, because when it comes to cancer, the opportunity cost is paid in lives.