ALEXANDRIA, Va. — As part of a collaborative program between CancerLinQ LLC and the Oncology Nursing Society (ONS) aimed at helping oncology practices successfully incorporate electronic health record (EHR) data into clinical operations, three ONS members completed training in June to serve in the CancerLinQ® Ambassadors Pilot Program. CancerLinQ, a health information technology platform that powerfully connects and analyzes real-world cancer care data from almost any electronic record source, provides oncologists, nurses, and other practice staff with near real-time, actionable data to improve patient care processes and outcomes.

The ONS members, hired as part-time employees of CancerLinQ LLC, a wholly-owned nonprofit subsidiary of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), will work to engage all healthcare professionals on the cancer care team to promote best practices and routine use of the CancerLinQ® platform to support effective clinical practice. All members of the cancer team in a CancerLinQ practice may have access to system data based on their roles in care delivery.

The ambassadors, Cathy Coleman, DNP, OCN®, CNL, faculty member from the School of Nursing and Health Professions at the University of San Francisco, CA, Katharine Szubski, BNS, RN, OCN®, RN, research coordinator from Advocate Russell Institute for Research and Innovation in Park Ridge, IL, and Kristin Maloney, BSN, RN, OCN®, clinical research nurse in the Phase I Program at Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, UT, participated in a four-day training event at ASCO’s headquarters in Alexandria, VA.

Their training focused on the CancerLinQ Insights Clinical Analytics and Quality Performance Indicator products within the CancerLinQ platform and included workshops to build competencies regarding big data and informatics in cancer care, improvement science, and innovation leadership. Deborah Struth, MSN, RN, research associate at ONS, and Rory Lettvin, BSN, RN, manager of the CancerLinQ Ambassadors Program, administered the training.

The ambassadors will work with care teams to review the data quality of practice-generated reports from CancerLinQ with the goal of driving practice success, identifying missing data and variations in documentation within the workflow to help improve the accuracy and reliability of clinical data captured in source systems such as the EHR and, ultimately, CancerLinQ. The ambassadors are prepared to assist CancerLinQ pilot sites located in different geographic regions, including San Francisco Bay Area, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Sioux Falls, SD, and other metropolitan areas. For this initial phase, each ambassador has been trained to assist a number of practice sites in each of the specified locations beginning in July 2017.

Ultimately, the CancerLinQ Ambassadors Pilot Program will provide oncology nurses with experience in engaging the care team with insights from big data analytics for use in clinical decision making and in working as quality improvement specialists as part of the CancerLinQ Practice Success Team. The program will help CancerLinQ early adopters to engage with the platform to understand and utilize data in EHRs for the purpose of promoting learning, data-driven quality improvement and improved patient care.

Health IT Homepage