CancerLinQ ties data to decisions

OncLive’s July 24, 2016 profile of CancerLinQ framed the project as an attempt to bring “big data” into day-to-day oncology care, not just retrospective research. David Delaney, then SAP’s chief medical officer for healthcare, and Kevin Fitzpatrick, then chief executive of CancerLinQ LLC, wrote that oncologists needed ways to use aggregate records from previously treated patients to inform choices for the patient in front of them. CancerLinQ was launched by the American Society of Clinical Oncology in 2012, according to the OncLive article and a 2020 paper in JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics. The platform was built to take data from multiple electronic health record systems, standardize it, and return it to practices through tools aimed at quality improvement and care delivery. (onclive.com) ### Why did CancerLinQ matter beyond clinical trials? A 2020 peer-reviewed paper on CancerLinQ said fewer than 5% of patients with cancer enroll in clinical trials, leaving large evidence gaps for the broader population seen in clinics. The authors said trial populations also often differ from the overall cancer population by age, race, performance status and other clinical factors. (onclive.com) The 2016 OncLive article made the same case in plainer terms: most cancer patients are treated outside trials, but their records historically have not been aggregated in ways that help physicians continuously learn from real-world outcomes. That gap is what CancerLinQ was designed to address. ### How does the system turn records into something a clinician can use? (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) The 2020 JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics paper said CancerLinQ accepts data from subscribing practices’ electronic health records and converts local records into a standardized representation based on the National Quality Forum’s Quality Data Model. The paper said CancerLinQ then feeds that information back to subscribing practices through tools that support quality improvement, while also creating de-identified datasets for research. (onclive.com) CancerLinQ’s current website says its technology is designed to improve quality of care, increase productivity and optimize clinical workflows for oncologists, cancer centers and community practices. The company says it now works with more than 100 subscribing cancer organizations, spans 13 different tumor-specific datasets and represents real-world data from more than 9 million patients. ### What does “point of care” look like in the current product line? (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) CancerLinQ said in a May 28, 2024 announcement that SmartLinQ already deployed new features including RxLinQ and TriaLinQ. The company said RxLinQ identifies patients who may be eligible for newly approved molecularly targeted therapies, including through a “Partial Match” list that can flag patients who may need genomic testing and targeted treatment review. (cancerlinq.org) The same 2024 announcement said TriaLinQ is designed to simplify trial screening and enrollment workflows. CancerLinQ said the tools are meant to reduce manual monitoring, automate notifications tied to new approvals and support patient-level insights across oncology care settings. (cancerlinq.org) ### Where does decision support show up most clearly? A collaboration announced by CancerLinQ and Atropos Health said participating clinicians on the CancerLinQ platform would be able to request on-demand analyses of millions of aggregated, de-identified records from similar patient cases. The companies said those analyses would be returned within days as a “Prognostogram” report to help answer treatment questions for individual patients. (cancerlinq.org) Sean Khozin, then chief executive of CancerLinQ, said in that announcement that the goal was to deliver solutions that improve care “in concrete and measurable ways” and help oncologists individualize treatment decisions at the point of care. Saurabh Gombar, co-founder and chief medical officer of Atropos Health, said the collaboration was intended to bring real-world evidence directly into care delivery. (atroposhealth.com) ### What does the longer arc show? As of March 2020, the JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics paper said CancerLinQ included data from 63 organizations using nine different electronic health records and covered 1,426,015 patients with a primary cancer diagnosis. The authors wrote that future practice-facing tools could include real-world data visualization, treatment recommendations for patients with actionable genetic variations and identification of patients who may be eligible for clinical trials. (atroposhealth.com) As of 2024 and 2025, CancerLinQ’s public materials describe a larger network and a more explicit set of workflow tools built around treatment eligibility, quality tracking and trial matching. The company’s website and product pages remain the main public source for those current offerings and participating oncology organizations. (cancerlinq.org) (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)