Dr. Anna Maria V. Storniolo, director of the biospecimen collections and biobanking center at the Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center at Indiana University, and her team are responsible for the comprehensive management of all biospecimen collections at the center.
The core includes blood, tissue samples, and clinical data from cancer patients, as well as tissue, blood, and medical history samples from more than 5,000 women for the Komen Tissue Bank, the world’s only normal breast tissue biorepository.
PROBLEM
“As you can imagine, efficiently collecting, storing, distributing, and cataloging these samples is a complex undertaking,” Storniolo said. “Once the cores are released, the samples are managed across a number of different databases, and there is no standard operating procedure for how each sample should be organized.
“The administrative burden of managing disparate systems means that research queries can take weeks to complete, and data generation efforts are often duplicated across projects,” she notes. “This process is time-consuming for the team tasked with supporting this work, as much of the searching is done manually.”
In the era of genomics, healthcare can gain insights across different time points, populations, and individuals. To make the most of this, cancer centers need to simplify the process of accessing information. Scientists are experts in their fields with limited time. They need user-friendly tools that provide them with accurate and reliable information.
“We need to make sense of the data and aggregate it across different platforms to answer the questions that drive research,” Storniolo explains. “This requires tools that can communicate across complex databases so that researchers are not dependent on limited IT resources.”
PROPOSE
IU’s cancer center needed a platform that could handle the volume of data across its data “universe” and the complexity associated with the many different types of data, both structured and unstructured. A clinical data platform promised to harmonize all available data and create a common resource for the cancer center, connecting biospecimen data with clinical and genetic data in one easily accessible tool.
“With this platform, research teams can quickly answer questions about specific groups and collaborate better with research teams,” Storniolo said. “Ensuring patient privacy and data security are maintained while enabling faster, easier democratization among partners is huge.”
Facing the Challenge
The cancer center and its clinical data platform provider worked closely to build a data system that suited the center’s needs as a biobank and the needs of the researchers who would use that biobank and its data..
““While the project is still being built and tested, one of the biggest impacts we’ve seen so far is speed,” Storniolo notes. “Previously, if a scientist needed to look at a certain number of patients with specific parameters—such as age, cancer biology details, and treatment type—it would take days to a week to determine how many samples fit the criteria, where they were, and whether the researcher requesting them was accessible.”
She added that with this platform, this can be done in just a few minutes.
RESULT
In the coming year, the IU cancer center hopes to be able to support more complex and additional research requests, while reducing the time spent performing manual tasks and creating duplicate research data.
“Our researchers will be able to check sample availability in real time on a self-service basis,” Storniolo reports. “This will allow them to determine project feasibility or generate ideas for new projects much faster than they can currently due to the bottleneck of the limited staff currently available to perform these searches.”
By year end, employees expect to see:
- Reducing the time spent performing manual tasks and reducing the creation of duplicate research data results in an overall reduction in ongoing operational costs.
- Significantly reduce processing time per request.
- Increase the number of supported research projects.
ADVICE FOR OTHERS
“The first step is to ask your researchers what they need and find a technology provider that is willing to adapt and keep up with changes in the industry,” Storniolo advises. “We don’t know everything that’s going to happen, and the way we think about science is always changing, so working with developers who are true collaborators and can adapt to the needs of their users is essential.
“Typically, when you think about technology needs, you have to consider both what is needed now and what needs will arise in the future as science continues to change,” she continued.
She added that besides user needs, efficiency is also an important factor to consider.
“The complexity and depth of scientific data today often results in a lot of manual work,” she says. “Understanding where you can gain efficiencies with technology is really important. You want to think about where you can build the most value for researchers by eliminating some of that manual work.
“Overall, adopting technology can seem challenging, but our goal in doing so is to empower science, not limit it,” she concludes. “With the right technology, your team can make data more accessible and accelerate research, driving innovation and breakthroughs.”
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Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
