Fred Ashbury, PhD, Ashvini Sengar, MD
Clinical decision support has never been more critical in this era of complexity
in cancer care delivery. With dozens of recent drug approvals and hundreds more anticipated in the next few years, new companion diagnostics, a substantial increase in omics-guided therapeutics in medical oncology and emerging in radiation oncology, busy oncologists simply cannot keep up with the information needed to help patients. Fortunately, VieCure’s artificial intelligence based clinical decision support platform has been designed to address this critical situation. To further our impact to help clinical decision- making, VieCure entered a partnership with Clarified Precision Medicine. Through this partnership VieCure will give clinicians the ability to order a ClarifiedSelect report with one click within clinical workflow. ClarifiedSelect reports offers practices access to a panel of precision oncology experts who review and offer clear suggestions for optimal treatment options based on the results of the associated tumor panel sequencing reports.
This July, VieCure is piloting the Clarified Precision Medicine workflow at Alabama Cancer Care. In following article Dr. Ash Sengar’s gives thoughts on the significance of this workflow, how it will improve clinical outcomes, and how it will impact his practice.
Fred Ashbury (FA): How will ordering ClarifiedSelect Reports impact your practice from an efficiency perspective and a patient outcome perspective?
Ashvini Sengar (AS): It starts with one-click ordering. Because of that functionality, there is no need to use a separate portal to access expertise to help with clinical decisions; having access to Clarified’s capabilities to assist decision-making within the VieCure platform will lead to more clinicians using the feature.
When it comes to patient outcomes, at a practice with a high number of patients with a myriad of different disease types, having the ability to lean on expert second opinions allows the clinicians to move more quickly to determine optimal treatment options.
FA: When are the scenarios where it would be helpful to have the ability to order a ClarifiedSelect Report?
AS: Ordering a ClarifiedSelect report will be especially helpful with complex cases. Sometimes we get a report where the genomic results reveal the patient’s tumor has multiple drivers and given these multiple targets there may be more than one actional variant. In these cases, having access to Clarified’s expertise to guide our busy physicians to the best approach to treat the patient is critical.
FA: Can you talk through the impact
of having the ability to order a ClarifiedSelect Report from within clinical workflow?
AS: Again, this goes back to ease of use. Most busy oncologists in the community setting resist or don’t seek external second opinion because it consumes a great deal of time to explain the case, gather and provide the relevant patient data, and discuss options. The fact that VieCure provides the ability to order the report within clinical workflow increases the likelihood that the physicians will order and action off the report in the first place. Additionally, upon optimization, the results of the ClarifiedSelect Report will come back into the VieCure platform discreetly, which will allow VieCure to display considerations automatically to the clinical team, based on the report’s results.This is another way that VieCure and Clarified will improve efficiencies in the practice.
FA: How does the addition of ClarifiedSelect ordering to the VieCure platform facilitate compliance with Precision Oncology standard of care?
AS: It gives physicians another tool that they can use to stay up to date on the latest care breakthroughs without having to spend the time they don’t have staying up to date with all the various Guidelines. Going a step beyond, there are circumstances where the Guidelines themselves be out-of-date, depending on the clinical situation which is why having access to expert second opinions is so helpful within clinical workflow.
Busy community oncology practices need a fully integrated artificial intelligence-based decision-support platform to facilitate appropriate diagnostic workup, treatment selection, treatment management, including supportive care, and post-treatment rehabilitation and survivorship. Cancer care is simply too complex to rely on existing tools and a myriad of different and expensive platforms poorly knitted together. VieCure’s platform and partnerships mitigate the effort and worry oncologists must keep up with the volume of new information. Partnering with Clarified is one more arrow in the quiver of oncologists to make the best decision possible to help cancer patients achieve successful outcomes.
Fredrick D. Ashbury, PhD
Chief Scientific Officer, VieCure Professor (Adj), Department of Oncology University of Calgary Professor (Adj), DLSPH, University of Toronto
Ashvini Sengar, MD
Owner, Alabama Cancer Care