ONCOVALUE consortium sees solid results from the first year with promising outlook for years to come
Utrecht, 20-2-2024 – ONCOVALUE, a consortium of cancer hospitals and commercial companies that are working together to implement value-based oncology care, completed its first year of research. The ONCOVALUE research focusses on enabling and guiding cancer hospitals to collect, harmonize and analyze high-quality Real-World Data (RWD) in real-time.
Pioneering in data sharing across Europe
During the first year of project implementation, partners worked hard to create a solid base to execute the ONCOVALUE project. This resulted in effective collaboration among partners working together, investigating what data is available to each clinical partner and establishing a common framework for selecting clinical use cases, examining their feasibility at each center and planning how to execute and validate the pilot studies. These are not things that are common knowledge and underline the pioneering work that has been done by the ONCOVALUE consortium for collaboratively utilizing RWD across Europe.
Federated Analytics
For RWD, partners have begun preparations to harmonize clinical hospital data into the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) common data model. This will enable us to analyze similar data between different hospitals in the future without pooling patient level data together in one central database. Eventually, we aim to display this data from the participating hospitals into a federated dashboard. There are many advantages in federated analysis: it enables bigger sample size, more variation in patients and also variation across the clinical centers and countries that are needed for value-based Health Technology Assessment (HTA) decisions.
The next priority will be to outline the technical steps needed to execute the federated dashboard combined with the related and ongoing effort in OMOP mapping. This also means focusing on data quality to ensure that the hospital generated RWD is of good enough quality that it can later be utilized for HTAs and regulatory purposes.
Setting up the advisory boards
Another significant milestone of the first year of project implementation was to establish two external stakeholder outreach groups. The Ethics Advisory Board consists of three members with expertise as a collective on large-scale data protection, ethics of AI, and ethics of cancer management.
The External Expert Advisory board members have relevant subject matter expertise from important stakeholders, that will aid in ensuring the impact of the project. By inviting the board members to participate in the project, we have secured outside subject matter expertise from different countries and fields to ensure solid results.
Structured data entry and AI tools for imaging and free text
The goal of ONCOVALUE is to increase the availability of structured data and information that can be used for creating Real-World Evidence (RWE). This is done with two tracks; the first track is to build structured data entry into modern EMR systems so that the data created during standard clinical routines is in structured form already in the recording phase.
The second track is to develop AI tools that can extract structured information from unstructured data such as radiological images or free-text medical notes. Developing and validating the AI models requires annotated image and text data, and the project is developing annotation tools to do just that. Once trained and validated on ONCOVALUE partner’s data, the AI models can then be applied to real-world unstructured data to extract structured information to be used in analytics supporting HTA and regulatory decision making.
Communication & Dissemination
The first year of the ONCOVALUE project also saw the foundation for a solid communication and dissemination strategy with the right tools to get the results across. The ONCOVALUE website now functions as a news hub, but it will later turn into a knowledge hub for the researchers and members of the ONCOVALUE consortium.
