Name: Mariska Rijnen
Function: CTcue consultant
Partner: IQVIA
Short biography
I feel very passionate about the healthcare field, namely the applications, processes, and data. We are witnessing amazing possibilities that health-related data creates for innovations and better patient care. Working towards a set goal and creating a better project is what motivates me the most, aside from meeting new people and working on exciting projects. This makes that I am always very much looking forward to new healthcare related challenges and contributing to projects aimed at improving and developing healthcare.
Contribution to ONCOVALUE research
My main focus is the automated data collection for patients with breast cancer to test if automatization is possible and see if this process can contribute to health technology assessment. This includes the automatic extraction of structured outcomes and creating structured outcomes from clinical notes. In brief, I am creating insights in what is possible to automatically extract from the electronic health record and what is not yet possible. With this, we can identify what actions are needed to overcome this problem in the future.
I am working together with the Netherlands Cancer Institute and a doctor from a Dutch hospital. Where the institute is taking the leading role in what data we want to collect, the doctor gives his view on how the patient flow happens in practice and with their input I generate a query which can automatically extract the required data from the electronic health record.
Challenges in ONCOVALUE
The biggest challenge for my part of the project is to see if and how data is noted down in the electronic health record. Healthcare data is very complex and depends a lot on how it is noted down. Due to little standardization it is a challenge to find the data and extract it in an automated manner. However, this makes it a nice challenge for me to make the dataset as complete as possible based on the resources available.
Expectations and Aspirations
I hope that my work will give a good insight in what we can already automatically extract from the electronic health record and what we need to change to automate it even more. These insights should contribute to a clear plan on how we can create a valuable dataset and lead to improving healthcare on a European level.
