mCODE Could Vastly Improve Cancer Care by Standardizing Patient Records in Electronic Health Records
ASCO in Action PodcastShow Notes
CancerLinQ Medical Director Dr. Robert Miller discusses how ASCO's new initative, mCODE (Minimal Common Oncology Data Elements), will help take the oncology community one step further to achieving interoperability in electronic health record systems. In the latest AiA podcast with host ASCO CEO Dr. Clifford Hudis, Dr. Miller says that doctors are expected by their patients to have all their relevant medical information to ensure they receive the highest quality cancer care. mCODE is working to encourage vendors to adopt a consistent set of data elements in their EHR platforms to achieve that goal.
Transcript
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Disclaimer: The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.
Dr. Clifford Hudis: Welcome to this ASCO in Action Podcast, brought to you by the ASCO Podcast Network. This is a collection of nine programs covering a wide range of educational and scientific content and offering enriching insights into the world of cancer care. You can find all of ASCO podcasts, including this one, at podcast.asco.org. The ASCO in Action Podcast is ASCO's podcast series that explores policy and practice issues that impact oncologists, the entire cancer care delivery team, and the individuals we care for-- people with cancer.
My name is Clifford Hudis, and I am the CEO of ASCO, as well as the host of the ASCO in Action Podcast series. For today's podcast, I am delighted to have as my guest Dr. Robert Miller. Dr. Miller is the medical director of ASCO's CancerLinQ initiative. And as many of our listeners know, CancerLinQ is a big data technology initiative that collects and analyzes real world cancer care data from multiple health care IT systems seeking to deliver insights to physicians, improve quality of patient care, and support new research.
What our listeners may be less familiar with is that, earlier this year, ASCO and CancerLinQ announced a very exciting collaboration that has the potential of bringing the oncology community one step closer to our goal of achieving interoperability amongst electronic health record systems. The project is called mCODE. That's a lowercase m and then capital C-O-D-E. It stands for Minimal Common Oncology Data Elements, or mCODE.
Dr. Miller is going to tell us a whole lot more about this important initiative. And I welcome you. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Miller.
Dr. Robert Miller: Thanks for having me.
Dr. Clifford Hudis: So, we've all heard about the inability of electronic health record systems to share information with each other. And I always, at the beginning of this, used to talk about my favorite proverbial story. A patient is discharged from a big-city emergency room after a month in the hospital. That hospital uses a single electronic record system, all the details are there. The person is on their way home and developed chest pain, ends up in a neighboring emergency room a mile away. And in most cases, how much of their record from the hospital where they spent a month, to the hospital where they're finding themselves in the emergency room, is transmittable at that moment?
Dr. Robert Miller: Yeah, I think that's an important question. And that's an example that I think we all have had experience with ourselves personally in health care, or their famili
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