During cancer treatments, seemingly simple questions can quickly get bewildering and overwhelming. One of them: Is there a clinical trial that I should consider for my treatment?
Patient and doctor need to figure out, together, if an experimental treatment is the right fit, if the patient is eligible, and even whether it’s logistically possible for the patient to participate, since many trials require frequent in-person visits. “With tens of thousands of clinical trials worldwide, it’s very hard to know what you’re eligible for,” says Dan Kuenzig, a director in Oracle’s Strategic Programs.
Enter The Opportunity Project (TOP), an initiative consisting of a 14-week development sprint that began last fall, in which software engineers were given swaths of “open” federal data and applied emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing resources to the analysis. The effort, which included more than a dozen technology providers and nonprofits, was led by the US Health and Human Services Office of the Chief Technology Officer and the Presidential Innovation Fellows.
Gil Alterovitz and Kristen Honey were among the Presidential Innovation Fellows leading the program and working across US agencies to identify government data that would be valuable during the initiative. One goal was to show agencies why sharing appropriate data with the private sector could drive new insights and tools.
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“Government agencies were interested in understanding and customizing datasets for various use cases but were primarily focusing on internal government use,” Alterovitz and Honey wrote in a blog post. “The lightweight collaboration through TOP Health strengthened the intersection of government and industry.”
‘Open-Ended’ Ideation
Kuenzig describes the work as “collaborative ideation,” which is much different from a typical request for proposals that a government agency would make for a specific technology or system. “This was much more open-ended than just a scope of work and provides a different environment to collaborate with government,” he says.
The teams of developers also spent time with patients undergoing cancer treatments, as well as government AI specialists with a deep understanding of the issues around clinical trials and patient matching. “We really got a sense of what people are going through in these extremely challenging times in their lives,” Kuenzig says. “It gave us a great sense of purpose.”
The Oracle team developed a new experience to help patients find a clinical trial.
The first part of the experience is a chatbot that lets a patient ask questions about his or her cancer treatment and provide background information, through a conversational text or voice interface available any time of day.
In the second part, a patient gives permission, via the chatbot, for the application to email his or her doctor for more medical information, since most people won’t know the detailed data needed to assess a clinical trial. A clinician then enters that data, using a simple wizard interface, into the app through a guided process. The app uses that information to find trials for which a person could be eligible.
Lastly, the patient can see the information on screen as an interactive map, showing where the trial is located relative to the patient’s home, letting the patient click to read more about the trial. The distance patients travel for treatment is a key part of the decision-making process. Many times, patients must balance in-person treatments with demanding jobs, personal commitments, and the ability to travel based on their health.
Model for Quick Progress
Fourteen weeks isn’t much time to analyze data and build a complex matching service, so the teams were moving fast. But they found that by applying the right technology and team, the sprint provided a good model for making quick progress. The teams demonstrated their solutions at a closed-door event at the White House, and the Oracle team plans to showcase theirs at the annual Oracle Federal Forum later this month. Kuenzig also said the team is exploring how this capability could be leveraged to solve other challenging problems facing society, like matching substance abuse patients with available treatment resources.
Date: March 19, 2019
Source: Forbes
