As medical science advances upon the molecular drivers of different cancers, and as cancer treatment consequently becomes more targeted and precise, clinical testing for molecular alterations has come online over the past decade to help clinicians match patients to these newer treatments.
“We have pills that allow us to target certain genomic alterations in tumors, usually with very few toxicities,” said thoracic oncologist and informaticist Travis Osterman, DO, MS, assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine and director of Cancer Clinical Informatics at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. “Oftentimes we’re able to maintain patients on that treatment for months or years before needing to think about changing to our more traditional approaches like chemotherapy.” 
Like many other clinical tests, these molecular tests produce structured data, that is, discrete values that can be clearly represented in tabular format in information systems. And unlike information that may be buried in text or images, structured data can readily be put to work by information systems for things like automated clinical decision support, or for electronic searches that clinicians might undertake to find health care outcome patterns among their patients.
Today, however, many treatment centers post these actionable test results into the electronic health record (EHR), not as structured data, but as uploaded text files, as PDFs. Osterman is leading the implementation of a new, dedicated genomics module at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) that will make these test results much easier to access.
VUMC’s EHR software comes from health information technology behemoth Epic Systems Corp., based in Verona, Wisconsin. Osterman is working to turn on Epic’s new genomics module at VUMC by summer 2021.
Read more in the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center's Momentum magazine here.