Revolutionizing cancer treatment with healthy data solutions

Cancer is a dreaded diagnosis, and thousands of scientists have devoted lifetimes and billions of dollars to finding a cure for this often terminal disease. The dedicated professionals at one global oncology company created an innovative way to treat solid tumor cancer. The treatment disrupts cancer cell division, inhibiting tumor growth and causing affected cells to die while sparing healthy tissue. The therapy is approved for treating one of the most difficult cancers in adults.

Technology With a Heart

The company’s patient-centric philosophy is demonstrated through the responsiveness of its patient support specialists, who provide patients with the right balance of science and care. A critical aspect of maintaining this balance 
is collecting accurate patient and device-generated data needed to ensure proper care. The company wanted to reduce this data collection burden with a comprehensive data management system that would allow the support team to focus on patient care. It turned to Protiviti for help improving its data management system with the following specific goals:

• Improve patient outcomes, increasing therapy durations and being more responsive to patient needs,
• Create a better system to maintain compliance with complex regulatory requirements, and
• Deliver better reporting by combining data in new ways.

Designing a Data Management System to Drive Results

Protiviti created a data warehouse, using SAP® enterprise resource planning (ERP) and SAP customer relationship management (CRM) tools to manage equipment and anonymize patient information.

The CRM tracks patient compliance and therapy duration to compare patient compliance to outcomes. The data may reveal how to enhance treatment or the device, and can be used to improve support service calls, track device issues and review aggregate or individual device information at a specific point in time.

The company applied data management best practices to specific areas of the data warehouse, allowing support specialists to assist patients faster and enabling comprehensive reporting in finance, operations and quality management. For example:

• Integrating data from the ERP and CRM systems into dashboards allows end-user access to a single source of truth, reduces manual effort and reduces the time required to respond to a patient need.
• Dashboards extract, combine and transform data to provide reporting flexibility without restrictions from source systems.
• Operations dashboards provide the ability to quickly determine device location, how well the devices are functioning, and whether they passed or failed regular physical inspections by the quality team.
• A holistic, enterprisewide view of compliance metrics lets users compare compliance to patient outcomes across several dimensions.

Special attention was taken to ensure the data management system complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Anonymized patient data, identifiable only by an ID number, is captured in a way that enables GDPR right of access, but no identifiable protected health information (PHI) or personally identifiable information (PII) is ever captured in the data warehouse.

End-to-End Insight

With Protiviti’s guidance, the company moved from manually gathering and compiling data from multiple sources to using a flexible and responsive data management system to quickly react to changing patient requirements. The insight gained by taking control of its data gives this global leader in cancer treatment the data power it needs to continue to grow and help cancer patients around the world.

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