Using and Improving the Real-World Data Ecosystem in Cancer

January 11, 2023

Yale Cancer Center Grand Rounds | January 10, 2023

Presentation by: Dr. Jeremy Warner

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ID: 9362
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00:00So it's a pleasure to introduce Jeremy
00:03Warner, who actually I first met
00:06this year when when I was chairing
00:08a panel at ESMO and he was
00:11one of the speakers who we invited.
00:15Jeremy is the director of the Brown
00:18Lifespan Center for Cancer Bioinformatics
00:21and data science and associate professor
00:24technically pending I guess, at Ed Brown.
00:29His clinical focus is Morgan
00:31hematology and he received
00:34his medical degree from from Boston
00:37University and also in a Masters in
00:41Photonics and Electrical and Computer
00:43Engineering from UC San Diego.
00:46In addition to his focus on
00:48malignant hematology, Dr.
00:50Warner is a leading expert in
00:51the clinical and translational
00:53clinical and translational
00:54cancer informatics research,
00:56including high dimensional data
00:58analysis and visualization,
00:59natural language processing
01:01of narrative oncology texts,
01:03and the creation and
01:04implementation of health data standards.
01:08Before coming to Brown.
01:12Jeremy was at Vanderbilt
01:14University Medical Center,
01:16where he was an associate professor of
01:18medicine and biomedical informatics.
01:22And I should also note that he
01:24is the deputy director of Escos
01:27Clinical Cancer Informatics Journal
01:29and a founding director of the New
01:31Brown University Center for Cancer
01:35Bioinformatics and Data Science.
01:37So without further
01:38ado, you're going to speak to us
01:40about using and improving real world.
01:42Hey there. Ecosystem in cancer.
01:45Thanks. Look forward to it.
01:49Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
01:51And if anybody wants to
01:52come up to Providence,
01:53just one stop away on the Acela, so.
01:58Really nice that we're so close here.
02:00In New England, so I just have a few
02:03disclosures first before I get started.
02:05So I have some grant funding,
02:07some consulting.
02:08I do have ownership in hemlock.org LLC,
02:11but has no monetary value unless one
02:13of you wants to be an Angel investor
02:15and we can talk after the presentation.
02:18So what I'm going to talk
02:20about here is you know why,
02:22why do we need real world data and real
02:24world evidence in oncology and I'm going
02:26to focus on electronic health records.
02:28There are other sources of
02:29real world data of course,
02:31but you know most of this talk
02:33will really focus on the ER,
02:34the HR.
02:35I will spend some time on talking about
02:37in particular interest in mine which
02:39is standardizing systemic anti cancer
02:41treatment representations and then
02:43I'll spend some time talking about
02:46our COVID and COVID-19 and cancer consortium.
02:49Which is a bit of a culmination,
02:50if you will,
02:51of some of these thoughts.
02:52So there are some learning objectives here.
02:55If hopefully this is a CME,
02:57so we'll we'll cover,
02:59you know,
03:00some aspects of natural language
03:02processing and how it can be used
03:04to get information out of EHR's,
03:05why we need formal representations
03:08for complex concepts.
03:10Such as systemic anti cancer therapy
03:12and then learning about how these these
03:14ideas went and propelled the COVID,
03:16the C19 registry.
03:20OK, so first of all, you know,
03:22probably everybody might be already
03:23familiar with these definitions,
03:24but I think it's always helpful to go over,
03:26you know, what is real world data,
03:28what is real world evidence.
03:30And you know, it's nebulous a little
03:32bit and depending on where you,
03:34you know, the, the resource you look at,
03:36you'll get a different definition.
03:37But this is my definition,
03:39which is really based on something
03:41called the I kW pyramid.
03:44Has anybody heard about this?
03:46Heard of the DKW? OK great.
03:47So teach you a little bit here.
03:49So the idea here is that it's a
03:52pyramid where you're climbing a
03:54levels here from a base of data.
03:57The next step is information.
03:59The next step is knowledge.
04:00The next step is wisdom.
04:01You'll know there's 5 levels here.
04:03There's a little tiny level at the top
04:05which some people use you for understanding.
04:08But basically the idea is no matter
04:10what where the data comes from.
04:13What it is,
04:14whether it's from a randomized control
04:16trial or case control registry,
04:19etcetera,
04:19the idea is that as you move up this pyramid,
04:21you're generating real-world evidence,
04:23whereas real world data is really that base.
04:26On the right here you see the
04:28the sort of traditional pyramid
04:30of of evidence based medicine.
04:33So if you look at this from another
04:35dimension kind of looking from above,
04:36when we think about cancer in particular,
04:39you know I think about sort of
04:41three big aspects of cancer,
04:42there's the genotype, the phenotype and
04:44then the environment and sort of for
04:46each of these you have these layers.
04:48So, so if you think about the
04:50data level for genotype that might
04:52that's just the sequence right,
04:53just the somatic tumor sequence.
04:56For phenotype,
04:57it might be just a histologic type,
05:01a cell, you know what, what is that?
05:03And for environment,
05:04it might be pollutant levels.
05:05Now this is data,
05:06but it's not really telling you anything,
05:08right.
05:08So we need to kind of walk up this pyramid.
05:10The next level for for these three buckets
05:13would be for genotype and environment.
05:15You might talk about pathogenicity.
05:17What does that change mean in terms of is it,
05:20is it a driver mutation?
05:21That's sort of the next level information
05:24cancer behavior on the phenotype.
05:26Side so is it,
05:28is it aggressive,
05:29is it a high grade malignancy
05:31or is it something indolent
05:33kind of stepping up further?
05:35For genotype knowledge,
05:36the knowledge level is actionability.
05:39What can you do with this information?
05:41Can can you actually prescribe a medication
05:44that will change the outcome for a patient?
05:46Phenotype,
05:46same,
05:47you know,
05:47just generally speaking what are
05:49the treatment options and then the
05:50environment are there risk modifications
05:52that can be taken and then really
05:53getting to that top level wisdom,
05:55you know this is this is
05:57really complicated now.
05:59So in in phenotype you're thinking
06:01about what are patient values
06:03and preferences and how do those
06:05influence what treatment options
06:06you might consider for genotype,
06:08what's the tumor going to do once
06:10it gets exposed to treatments,
06:12how is it going to evolve under
06:13treatment pressure and an environment
06:15you've got issues about social justice.
06:16And structural racism.
06:17So those are all kind of like.
06:19The ideas of climbing this pyramid alright,
06:21hopefully I've convinced you
06:22the difference between data and
06:23evidence as we kind of step up.
06:25Now, why do we need this real-world evidence?
06:28Well, clinical trials are wonderful,
06:30but they're also expensive,
06:32slow to conduct, and they don't
06:35always represent the full population.
06:37At risk also trials,
06:40prospective trials,
06:41collect some but not all potentially
06:44pertinent information.
06:45And our space is huge.
06:46Oncology,
06:46the treatment space and oncology is huge.
06:49And then lastly,
06:50I think last but not least is that
06:51we've got this enormous data source,
06:53which is the electronic medical record.
06:56So just a few words about each
06:57of these items.
06:58So when you think about
06:59trials and disparities,
07:00this is a paper we just published
07:02very recently and this one was
07:06earlier this year and we just
07:07published another one in Jim
07:08Oncology looking at prostate cancer.
07:09This one looks at immune checkpoint
07:11inhibitors across cancers.
07:12And basically the take home message here
07:14is that when you look across Childs,
07:16there is really a lot of disparity
07:20in who enrolls in trials.
07:22And it can be different by cancer type,
07:25but it's pretty consistent across the board.
07:27And it's not always underrepresentation.
07:29Sometimes it's over representation,
07:30as you can see from the bottom row.
07:32But you know, essentially the yellow ones,
07:35the yellow circles are intersections of,
07:40in this case, gender, age,
07:44race and ethnicity, and a cancer type
07:46where the enrollment is as you'd expect.
07:49If it's green, it's sort of more than
07:50you'd expect, and if it's red, it's.
07:52It's less than you'd expect.
07:53So. So you know this,
07:55this gets that generalizability and there
07:57might be statistical ways around this,
07:59but you know, essentially.
08:03Our knowledge from clinical trials
08:05is primarily coming from younger.
08:08White men, OK, so.
08:12How about the information that gets left out?
08:14So this is, this was amazing.
08:17This is the recovery group that
08:19really geared up during the early
08:21days of the COVID pandemic and found,
08:23you know,
08:24pragmatic trials that they ran in
08:26the UK and they found some really
08:29important treatment options for COVID.
08:31This is one of their papers.
08:32This is probably the most impactful look,
08:35showing that dexamethasone could
08:38help hospitalize patients with COVID.
08:40And I've excerpted a table from that paper.
08:45Take a minute and let.
08:46So what's missing from this table?
08:48So this is a table of previous
08:50coexisting diseases in the
08:51patients who have COVID.
08:52Is there something missing?
08:55From this table.
08:58Something that's the topic of this talk.
09:02Cancer, right.
09:03There's no cancer in the stable.
09:06They did not collect cancer and
09:07and or they didn't report it.
09:09Well, we actually, we actually went and
09:11you know got their case report forms,
09:14they didn't record cancer.
09:15So here they enrolled 10s of thousands
09:17of patients in these trials.
09:18And they don't know if these
09:20patients had cancer or not.
09:21And so I mean, amazing work,
09:23but we're missing a key piece of information.
09:27And then sort of the last item you know
09:29that I met that I mentioned before is
09:31that this idea that our treatment space
09:34is huge but head-to-head comparisons
09:36of important drugs are mostly absent.
09:39And I'll just give you one example.
09:41So this is the space of PD1 inhibitors
09:44which have changed our obviously changed
09:46our fields from our hemac knowledge
09:48base which I'll talk about a bit later.
09:51We have 137 trials that have been published
09:55using 64 different regimens of of various.
09:5781 inhibitors.
09:58This includes XUS by the way.
10:01If you're like they're not 13 P you
10:02want to have actually there are,
10:04but many of those are only approved in China.
10:07So 83 of those are phase three trials.
10:11Take home point is one of those 83
10:14actually compared to PD1 inhibitor
10:16to a PDL 1 inhibitor kind of it
10:19actually compared to Kobe matanov and
10:21atezolizumab and that's grand total
10:23of zero of these trials compared 1PD1
10:26inhibitor to another PD1 inhibitor so.
10:29You know,
10:29maybe I'm missing some trials that are
10:31ongoing now that have yet to be published.
10:32But at this point in time,
10:34we don't have any data at all on whether
10:371PD1 inhibitor is better than another
10:40except for indirect treatment comparisons,
10:42so.
10:43Hopefully I've convinced you that.
10:45We should at least think
10:47about using real-world data.
10:49But.
10:49They are messy,
10:51ambiguous and unpredictable.
10:53So let me talk about some some
10:55challenges that we have once we
10:57start delving into the real world.
10:59So first of all.
11:01This is real-world data from the Medline.
11:07Institution information.
11:08OK, so did you know that there were 21
11:12clinical trial institutions in New Haven?
11:15Did you know that?
11:16That's amazing, right? Here they are.
11:19Smilow Cancer Center, Smilow Cancer Hospital,
11:23smilow cancer hospital at Yale,
11:26Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale University,
11:28Yale Cancer Center.
11:30Yale Cancer Center and Smilow Cancer
11:32Hospital, Yale Medical school.
11:33Alright, I think you get the idea, right?
11:36So I mean this is real world.
11:38I mean you have to do something.
11:40I mean, a computer is not going to know,
11:41right? I mean,
11:42so if you want to use this data in some way,
11:46someone's got to do some work
11:48to actually fix this, right?
11:49That is a big part of working
11:52with real world data.
11:53Yale New Haven hospital.
11:55There's the 21st, OK?
11:58OK. So how about,
12:00so that's bibliometrics to some degree,
12:02how about treatments,
12:03how many tyrosine kinase
12:05inhibitors are there?
12:07And so this is a little project that
12:10a student of mine undertook where they
12:13mapped out how many letters you'd have
12:16to switch around or basically misspell.
12:19So that one tyrosine kinase inhibitor
12:21would actually be another one.
12:23And so it's it's fewer letters
12:25than you think and.
12:27You know, these drugs get misspelled
12:30all the time in a pretty amazing ways.
12:34I see that the net,
12:34there's a little bit of formatting
12:36issue with the next slide, but.
12:38So this this is real data.
12:43From the Vanderbilt University
12:45Medical Center.
12:46So this is from our text list of medications.
12:49Now you might say, oh,
12:51let's just, you know,
12:52we've got to be able to get these
12:53medications from structured data.
12:54That may or may not be true.
12:56It depends. We can talk more about that.
12:58But these are real misspellings
13:00of the drug or Latino BI.
13:01Think you can tell looking at this
13:03that all of these are or lot in him.
13:05But again,
13:06I mean if you don't have some sort of
13:08system to harmonize all those misspellings.
13:12You're not going to know
13:13which patient got what drug.
13:15So.
13:15So that's you know, that's a real
13:18world issue with real world data.
13:20This is work that we did some
13:22years ago on staging,
13:23so cancer staging.
13:26Here is what I call manageable ambiguity.
13:30All right,
13:32so.
13:32And again and and maybe you
13:34know during sort of discussion
13:35we can talk about the value of
13:37structured versus unstructured data,
13:39but the idea here is that we would
13:41take data from progress notes from
13:44clinical text to all these notes.
13:46And figure out if a patient had stage
13:49123 or four. So just forget ABC.
13:51We're just trying to go for the big stages.
13:55And you know,
13:56the problem that we knew ahead of
13:58time is that these things are going
14:00to be recorded variably in different
14:01notes by different types of doctors.
14:03But you know we did a pilot
14:06with about 1000 patients with
14:07lung cancer with over 460,000
14:10clinical documents across them.
14:11Now if you pause for a minute and you think
14:14about. A chart review.
14:15Think about how long it would take you to
14:18go through 460,000 documents, right so.
14:20Here's my pitch for natural
14:22language processing.
14:23You can actually automate this kind of
14:26thing and and do this kind of work at scale.
14:30So cutting to the chase a little bit here.
14:35First of all, we found that
14:36out of those 964 patients,
14:3899% had some kind of stage freeze
14:41in their note. At least one.
14:45And we also had a gold standard
14:47which was the tumor registry data.
14:48So we were able to compare
14:51our system to to the subset.
14:53You'll notice only 790 out of
14:56those 964 had tumor registry data,
14:57but we were able to do a comparison and you
15:00know our system worked really pretty well.
15:03The green, you know,
15:04basically the matches are in the green,
15:05the big numbers and we got some things wrong,
15:08but we didn't usually get things
15:10really wrong most of the time.
15:11So if it was stage one,
15:12we called stage four,
15:13that was a big mistake.
15:15Only happened once.
15:19This, this shows actually,
15:22so again 460,000 documents.
15:24So what we wanted to say is.
15:26And you have to look at all
15:28of those or can you just look
15:30at notes that were written?
15:32Right after a patient was diagnosed
15:34you know with if you think of
15:36some of this inspiration for this
15:38project came from the copi measures.
15:39And if any of you have done that work
15:41you'll remember I believe and they
15:43may have changed but at one point
15:45the coping measure was was stage
15:46recorded in one of the first two
15:48progress notes written after diagnosis.
15:50So it kind of makes sense that
15:52you would look for stage early on
15:54but if you look at this black line
15:56here at the bottom. So does this.
15:58Are you seeing my?
15:59You don't see the arrow, are you?
16:01I don't think you're seeing the error, OK.
16:03If you look at the black line
16:04towards the bottom, you'll see that.
16:06If you look at the the notes in the
16:08first five weeks from diagnosis,
16:09actually there's a pretty high
16:11rate of unknown stage.
16:12Like we couldn't determine it.
16:13It wasn't until we got to five
16:15weeks and out that we had enough
16:17mentions of stage that we could
16:19sort of make that determination.
16:21So we saw this kind of inflection point.
16:23And so that's another thing just
16:25to to note when you're working
16:27with real-world data is that,
16:28you know, time matters,
16:30time can matter a lot.
16:31And the other thing that really matters is,
16:33is ambiguity.
16:34So I mentioned we found stage
16:36in 99% of the records.
16:37What I didn't mention is that
16:40most of those are 84% had more
16:42than one stage in their records,
16:44OK and some some degree of discordance.
16:48So one note might say they have stage one,
16:51another note night say they have stage two.
16:54Actually when we constructed a network
16:56graph on the right here you see like
16:59every possible combination was present,
17:00every possible combination including
17:02you know more terms that are
17:05more generic like early stage,
17:07advanced stage.
17:08Everything you know happens and you
17:11know and and and on the bottom left
17:14here you can see a histogram of of Co
17:17occurrences of various stage information.
17:19But I do think that so that
17:22really potentially ambiguous.
17:23One take home point from this
17:25though is that we we use a
17:27really simple decision rule on,
17:28you know, what is the actual stage?
17:30We just chose the phrase that showed up
17:33the most OK and that and that seems to work.
17:35So if stage three shows up
17:37in the notes 100 times,
17:38in stage one shows up twice.
17:40Chances are at stage three now,
17:42just sort of a practical rule and it worked.
17:45Now getting back to that, you know,
17:48whole idea of.
17:49You know unknown or sort of lack of
17:51information and missingness which is
17:53a major issue with real world data.
17:55This is another mini project we
17:58did looking at colon cancer and
18:00we wanted to say could you find
18:03patients with stage 3 colon cancer
18:05and this was for the OCM project,
18:07the oncology care model.
18:08So you know really important as a
18:10metric to know if these patients
18:11got appropriate treatment within
18:13appropriate period of time.
18:14But again what we saw here.
18:16Is this sort of crossover at
18:18about seven weeks, at which point?
18:22You know, the the stage was changing
18:23or it was or is missing in the records
18:26and it wasn't until about seven weeks
18:27after diagnosis that you get to a
18:29kind of steady state where you can
18:31definitively say a patient has stage
18:33three or we don't know the stage so.
18:37Here's some really interesting
18:38work from here, actually from Yale,
18:41from the Radiation Oncology department,
18:43where they they actually looked at
18:46missingness as a variable, if you will.
18:49So they took the National Cancer database,
18:52the NCDB data, and they split patients
18:56into whether they had complete records or
18:59had some missing data from their record.
19:02Now the NCDB is not EHR data, right?
19:05But it is based on EHR data.
19:08So it I would call it a real
19:09world data source because it's,
19:11you know, curated out of EHR data.
19:13And you know the punch line here is that
19:17missing this is an independent prognostic
19:19factor for survival which is really an
19:22interesting thing to think about, right.
19:24And and it kind of depends on what kind
19:27of what kind of cancer you have as well.
19:29So they found for instance on the left.
19:31If you have non small cell lung cancer,
19:33it's the non metastatic patient
19:35who had a real difference in their
19:38prognosis if they were missing data.
19:40Whereas with prostate cancer it was the
19:42metastatic group that sort of split apart.
19:44But either way, I mean this is.
19:47Yeah, just think about it for a
19:48minute while I get my water bottle.
19:49It's.
19:50Interesting.
19:58OK. It's it's certainly not something
20:01that we conventionally use as a metric.
20:04Certainly not in a clinical trial
20:06because there's it's not an issue, right?
20:09Case report forms are complete,
20:11but missing this itself can be
20:13informative as in real world data.
20:16So what I wanted to do now is actually take
20:19us down a little different path briefly,
20:21which is a brief diversion into
20:22the history of medical records.
20:24Anybody know what the what this is?
20:26It's a local local.
20:31Eli Whitney's mill. OK,
20:32so it's kind of cool if you never been there.
20:34It's still there.
20:35Doesn't exactly look like this anymore,
20:38but you'll see why I'm showing
20:39this in a in a couple slides, so.
20:43So this is also this is a real thing.
20:47OK, so this is one of my favorite vehicles
20:51from the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville.
20:54Which is Doctor Weiner mentioned,
20:55I was there for about a decade
20:58and so this is a real vehicle.
20:59There's they actually have a
21:01collection of these and it makes
21:02me think of electronic medical
21:04records because it it works, right?
21:06It it actually this person's
21:08actually driving this car.
21:10But we don't exactly see propeller driven
21:12cars on the roads these days, right?
21:15So our ER, but it works.
21:17So MR's are functional,
21:18but are they fit for the purpose
21:19that we want to use them for?
21:23I think many of us have, you know,
21:25some ideas about that, but you know,
21:27when you think about medical records,
21:28this is obviously a little bit
21:31before the computer, you know,
21:33medical records have been around for.
21:36Almost, you know,
21:373500 years in one form or another.
21:39But what's interesting to me?
21:42Is that they were primarily
21:43used for teaching or didactics.
21:45Until very recently,
21:46that was the only purpose of medical records.
21:50And then sort of the second
21:53purpose that arose, if you will,
21:56didn't arise until the 1880s.
21:57It's not that long ago if you think about it.
21:59And that was for legal purposes,
22:02legal defense.
22:03And, you know,
22:05essentially to have a written record
22:07of what happens in case there was a
22:10lawsuit around medical malpractice.
22:12And we'll skip that and sorry
22:14about the there's some Mac to
22:17PC changes here with the font.
22:19So it's a little bit hard
22:20to read some of this,
22:21but you know how about billing
22:23that that's billing is the
22:25major driver rate of how our
22:27medical records look like today.
22:29But that only really happened in
22:311960s is really not long ago and until
22:34you know not so long ago physicians
22:38were paid with food and lodging.
22:41If they were lucky.
22:44This is a picture from the Confucian
22:47medical system where there's at
22:49least some cases where the the court
22:52physician was basically executed if
22:53the if the emperor did not get better.
22:56So that's a pretty harsh payment
22:59or penalty if you will.
23:00But you know what really changed
23:02things was the Medicare Act of 1965,
23:05which basically established this profile.
23:08You know,
23:09quote usual customary and
23:10reasonable fees which.
23:11Drive so much of what we do.
23:13And sorry about the font
23:14that's messed up here,
23:15but there's a quote from the AMA,
23:18the American Medical Association,
23:20that said that the 1965 Medicare Act
23:22was the most deadly challenge ever
23:24faced by the medical profession.
23:26That's actual quote.
23:29It certainly changed things a lot.
23:30And then what I'd argue also changed
23:33things was really more recent was
23:35in the 90s when the physician fee
23:36schedule was introduced and then
23:38something called the evaluation and
23:40management guidelines, which I think.
23:41A lot of us know more than
23:43we ever wanted to know about,
23:44but those really changed how
23:47medical records were were written.
23:51Noticed that haven't yet used
23:52the word electronic, right?
23:54So now what about patient care,
23:57which I think all of us want that to
23:59be the primary purpose of medical records.
24:02This kind of dates back to
24:05the 1800s in some ways.
24:06The case records of the
24:08Massachusetts General Hospital.
24:10Introduced some ideas like
24:11history of presenting illness,
24:13past medical history and so forth,
24:15medical record numbers.
24:16The whole idea that you would track a
24:19patient by a number was introduced at
24:20the Mayo Clinic in the early 1900s,
24:22where they also introduced the chief
24:25complaint and the review of systems.
24:28And then the American,
24:30the American College of Surgeons,
24:32this is amazing bit of history
24:34if you didn't know in 1918, they.
24:38There was no federal mandate of any.
24:40They basically mandated as
24:41a professional organization.
24:42They mandated that hospitals had to
24:45keep records including a discharge
24:47summary that basically said was the,
24:50you know, patient,
24:50you know alive or dead at the time they left.
24:52And at that time fewer than 20% of
24:56physicians kept any kind of record at all,
24:58which is like. Amazing, right?
25:03Now this is tying back to that Eli Whitney.
25:05So this is, you know,
25:07for those that did take records,
25:09this is kind of what they looked
25:11like as these are called case books.
25:12I'm not sure where this one is from,
25:14but it's basically a handwritten.
25:18And and what's really interesting about
25:20this is that it's physician centered, right.
25:23This is not,
25:24this is a diary basically it's not you know,
25:26one patient has one book,
25:28this was written as.
25:30The doctor saw patients,
25:31so if you ever wanted to go back and say OK,
25:34Mr. Smith or whoever,
25:35like put their case together,
25:37good luck.
25:40So really the the most recent innovation
25:42if you will in medical records was
25:44this one and that from Austin from
25:46the mid 1960s which is the problem
25:49oriented medical record which which
25:51was conceived as a quote medical
25:53record that guides and teaches.
25:55So kind of back to that idea of
25:57didactics in a way and and I'm sure
25:59everybody's familiar with this,
26:00this idea, this soap notes, right.
26:04What I like from the paper when
26:07doctor we'd introduced this idea.
26:09This is a quote which I think
26:12actually forecasts the ER right so,
26:15and it's worth reading it.
26:16It can be readily,
26:17readily be seen that all narrative
26:19data presently in the medical
26:21record can be structured,
26:22and in the future all narrative data
26:24may be entered through a series of
26:26displays guaranteeing a thoroughness,
26:27retrievability,
26:28efficiency and economy important
26:30to the scientific analysis of a
26:32type of datum that has hitherto.
26:34Been handled in a very unrigorous manner.
26:36It's an amazing quote.
26:37I mean,
26:38this is essentially before any
26:41electronic medical record, right?
26:42But he basically saw it, saw it coming.
26:47I think the most important part of
26:49this quote is this to be concluded.
26:52We're living through the evolution
26:54of these electronic medical records.
26:57This is actually a two-part paper,
26:59that's why it says this.
27:00But I think, you know,
27:00he could have been like OK,
27:02we don't know what's going to happen.
27:05It's worth taking a step back
27:07and saying what you know what.
27:09So now I'm going to say electron what
27:11is the electronic health record for?
27:14And it's got primary uses and secondary uses.
27:16So the primary uses are are patient
27:19care and delivery, financial billing.
27:20But it's this, when you talk about
27:23real-world data and real world evidence,
27:24that's a secondary use,
27:26as it's conceived here in this model,
27:28which the Institute of Medicine put forward.
27:31All right.
27:31So moving ahead a little bit.
27:33So this is where we were in the mid 2000s
27:36and this is when I was in medical school.
27:38At that time there was issues
27:41around funding to you know roll out
27:44electronic medical records and.
27:46What I like on the bottom here is in
27:482003 the mass medical society did a
27:50survey where 89% of physicians wanted
27:52EHR data, but 48% refused to use an ER.
27:56So little bit of a disconnect there
27:59and and by 2004.
28:01Hardly anybody was using medical records.
28:04So what changed?
28:05Arguably this this is, you know,
28:08one of the events that really changed things.
28:11Is everybody familiar with Katrina
28:14and what happened in in New Orleans?
28:17Does everybody know why the?
28:20Record so there's a picture there
28:21on the right.
28:22It's everybody know why those
28:24were in the basement.
28:26That flooded.
28:27It's the they are so heavy that the
28:29building literally would have collapsed
28:32under the weight of the paper if
28:35they'd been up on higher floors.
28:37So that's why they have their
28:39medical records in the basement and
28:41and they were all destroyed, right?
28:42They were all just lost.
28:43So, so fast.
28:45We're a little bit the High Tech Act in 2009,
28:48which Obama signed this this is what really.
28:51You know,
28:52gave a lot of money for institutions
28:54to really start putting any Mrs.
28:56but what is interesting is if
28:58you look at sort of the adoption
29:01curve and there's a couple,
29:03I won't get into the details here.
29:04There's a couple ways of like what is an
29:06EHR basic versus complete and so forth,
29:09but you actually see.
29:12You actually see them starting,
29:13so here's E&amp;M coming out in the mid 90s.
29:16Here's Katrina in 2005.
29:19There's the High Tech act.
29:20By the time the High Tech Act comes out,
29:22actually we're like well on the
29:25adoption curve and so, you know,
29:27definitely help things along, but you know,
29:30the process is already starting.
29:32Umm.
29:33And then you know where.
29:35So this is already five years old,
29:37but I think, you know it's it's.
29:40And sorry,
29:41sorry again,
29:41can't see the text there.
29:42But you know already by
29:44five years ago people were
29:46reporting that EHR's were
29:47a major driver of burnout.
29:49So, so you know, it's problematic.
29:51But OK, here's a here's a
29:53few other challenges. So.
29:55And I'm sure everybody who's
29:56clinical knows these things already.
29:58But carry forward a copy pasting is
30:02ubiquitous in medical records and
30:04there's just a ton of redundancy.
30:06Here's a paper that basically shows that.
30:09Umm. You know, large,
30:11large portions of any note you
30:13particularly look at have been
30:16copied forward from other notes.
30:18Progress notes.
30:19In particular,
30:20more than half of progress
30:22note material is copy copied
30:24forward from previous notes.
30:27This is a different study looking at you
30:31know how many progress notes have a manually
30:33entered text versus copied in any kind.
30:34And you can see again like very few progress
30:38notes have have fully written text.
30:40Which you would say is fully original, but.
30:44So I think it's a legitimate question
30:45to say what are we dealing with here?
30:47Is it a giant pile of paper
30:48or is there actually meaning.
30:49So this is a little little tiny project
30:52I did and when during fellowship where
30:54I basically took one of my patients
30:57charts and I counted up like how
30:59many data points are in that chart.
31:02And you can see the blue bars are all the
31:05structured data elements like billing
31:07codes or vital signs or lab values.
31:11And then these red bars are the words
31:13in the clinical documents and you
31:15see that that just drowns out right,
31:17the structured data.
31:18So there's a lot of data there but.
31:21It's awesome.
31:22There's even more than that, right?
31:24So in this chart.
31:26And this is small these days, right?
31:28So this was more than 10 years ago,
31:31there was another 277 pages of scanned
31:34documents with 69,000 words in them
31:37that were basically inaccessible,
31:38but and and the take home point here.
31:41Is that this is what it all boils down to,
31:44OK?
31:46Patient with diffuse large B cell lymphoma.
31:48It was a complete remission after
31:50getting 6 cycles of our chop.
31:52I think that's enough for most research.
31:54OK now how can we,
31:57how can we boil things down like
31:59that because that's that's kind of
32:00maybe what we're talking about here.
32:02So and of course there's more to it right.
32:06But you know when you think about what's
32:09in ER's or EHR's and and what is not.
32:13Umm.
32:13You have to know what you're,
32:15you have to know what you're going to find,
32:16right.
32:17So, so let's say you know you've
32:19unlocked this medical record,
32:21but it's not necessarily going
32:22to have what you want.
32:23So here's, here's some, you know,
32:25basically some big buckets, right.
32:28So you're going to find the person's
32:30date of birth, no problem, right.
32:31But you're not going to find
32:33probably where they were born,
32:34the circumstances of their birth,
32:35where their complications.
32:37Very unlikely, because they will have.
32:39You know they won't have lived
32:41their whole system with their
32:42life within the electronic air,
32:43and they won't have all that data.
32:45You might find their biologic sex,
32:47no problem,
32:47but are you going to find
32:48their gender orientation,
32:49that sexual identity?
32:50You'll find race in this city,
32:52but are you going to find other
32:55social determinants of health?
32:56You'll find the medications
32:58that they are prescribed,
32:59but will you find what they actually took,
33:01the medication that they took and the
33:04regimens and we're going to get into
33:05that next you'll find laboratory tests,
33:08but you want necessarily find images.
33:10And so forth.
33:12So kind of you know as moving
33:15forward. Thinking about what you know,
33:17the low hanging fruit.
33:20You know it's the cancer type,
33:22it's easy like we don't need to create
33:23a new system to get cancer type.
33:25You can get that from billing codes,
33:27registry data.
33:28The treatments are hard like our chop
33:32times 6, that's hard determining that
33:34the patients in a complete remission,
33:37that's really hard.
33:37So what I go for the middle,
33:39I don't go for the middle ground, right,
33:40I'm going to tackle the thing in the middle.
33:43So now I'm going to switch gears here
33:45for a bit and talk about our work on
33:49standardizing systemic anti cancer treatment.
33:51And before I get into that.
33:55If you've not seen this XKCD cartoon,
33:58it's a classic.
33:59And this is a challenge, right?
34:01Whenever you decide to create a new
34:04standard or you actually just you know.
34:07Just creating more complexity or not.
34:09Hopefully we're not.
34:10Well, what we did in this space,
34:12there really weren't 14 existing standards.
34:14There were none.
34:15And so as everybody here knows,
34:17I could skip past this slide.
34:19Chemotherapy regimens are complicated and
34:22given in cyclic fashion combinations.
34:26This was the standard when
34:27we got started on our work.
34:30This is, you know,
34:31one example of these things called
34:32cancer chemotherapy handbooks,
34:34kind of recipe books, physical books,
34:37right.
34:37With some some details here,
34:39but maybe not enough.
34:41Here's another example from 2005.
34:46Which if you kind of look in
34:49detail about what's there.
34:51There's there's a lot of optionality here,
34:54some of the references.
34:56Here's a little excerpt from the Adenoma.
34:58I don't know carcinoma of
35:00unknown primary section,
35:00but the references are to non small
35:03cell lung cancer so there's sort of a
35:05mismatch there in the evidence base.
35:07So what we did is we.
35:09Really basically tried to collect
35:11all this information and put
35:12it into a computable format,
35:13which is our hemlock.org website and
35:16the ontology that comes from it.
35:19So he might.org is a is a website with
35:22the goal to collect all standard of
35:25care systemic anti cancer treatment.
35:27That's the goal.
35:29It's a big goal and at the website has
35:32grown over more than a decade now.
35:35Of almost 1000 primary content pages,
35:37over 7000 references,
35:39and a large editorial board,
35:41actually members of which are from Yale.
35:44And and many page views,
35:46so 1.4 million page views last year,
35:49we do get visitors from all over
35:52the world were primarily US based.
35:55I always like to throw in that we've
35:58had one visitor from North Korea.
36:00I don't know who it is,
36:01but I don't think I want to know.
36:03So what what can we do with this website?
36:06So what we did over time,
36:08over the past 11 years is create
36:10a structure such that we could
36:12actually take the content and
36:14develop a formal model.
36:15And so this is the model?
36:17Or this is part of the model?
36:20And I don't have time right
36:21now obviously to kind
36:22of go through all these details,
36:24but it's somewhat complex and enlarge
36:27we have over 100,000 concepts and
36:31300,000 ways in which those are
36:34interrelated in the latest version.
36:36This is yeah, this is basically,
36:39this is showing, you know,
36:41I don't have time to actually
36:43show the website.
36:43This is a screenshot from the
36:45website showing basically that
36:47each regimen on the website is.
36:49In such a way that we can take
36:50all those pieces and put them
36:52into the into the data model.
36:54And and and then we can start to do
36:55cool things with real world data.
36:56So here's a project that we did
36:59with with some folks in South
37:02Korea who basically had access to.
37:07Essentially medication level database.
37:08And remember I mentioned you know way
37:11back when that we might get medications,
37:13but to actually understand regimens
37:15we have to do something extra.
37:17And So what they did is they
37:19applied our model and they mapped
37:21medications through regiments and
37:22and they were able to look basically
37:25over a decade of time 2008 to 18.
37:27And you can see here that you know the
37:29changing pattern of care in that country.
37:31So you see that for example of you know
37:35bevacizumab wasn't used really until
37:372014 and then it started getting popular.
37:40And by the year 2018,
37:42it's, you know,
37:43full Fox and Bevacizumab Kappa,
37:44a good chunk of of the treatment regimens,
37:48whereas something like fluorouracil
37:50monotherapy essentially disappears
37:52off the off the scene by the
37:55by the time you get there.
37:57This is much more recent so that
37:59that's from a couple of years ago
38:01now we're working with folks at the.
38:05University of California System have a
38:08really cool combined database across all
38:10the UC's and California is kind of a.
38:12You know, country unto itself, once you
38:14start putting all this data together,
38:16this is just from UCSF and again
38:20we're taking, we're taking medication
38:23exposure data including time stamps
38:25and we're mapping that to regimens.
38:29And and you see that.
38:32At least nowadays, full fernox is
38:36the most popular regimen there.
38:39And so that's that alone is
38:40an interesting thing, right?
38:43You also see some funny things, right?
38:45Like so I didn't know Leuprolide was a
38:47treatment for pancreatic cancer, did you?
38:50Is it? Not no, right. No.
38:54But these are real patients, right.
38:56And they actually have second malignancies.
38:57So these are people who have
38:59also have prostate cancer and
39:00they're also getting leuprolide.
39:02So you, you, you kind of have to you know,
39:04it's not enough to get that data out.
39:06You've got to,
39:07you got to apply knowledge, right.
39:09You've got to, you've got to determine,
39:10you know, am I, what am I looking at?
39:12Does it make sense, is it?
39:14Is it relevant and and?
39:17And so that that that's why we're
39:19seeing things like that so.
39:21Umm. Here's another kind of.
39:24Here's another.
39:24Gives you a taste of what we can look at.
39:26So that this is this is looking at folfirinox
39:29and and then looking at cycle by cycle.
39:32What's happening?
39:33So one of my long-term interests,
39:35as well as Doctor Zach here,
39:37is to understand treatment delays,
39:40dose reductions.
39:42Removals of medications from a regimen drop,
39:45you know, dropping a drug and this starts
39:47to get at that and you can kind of see,
39:50you know,
39:50each of those bars represents cycle to cycle,
39:52the cycle you see.
39:54People.
39:55People dropping out, right.
39:56And and so and then you can actually see
39:59why and you can see on the top here.
40:02These, these bands at the top are showing.
40:04You know, these these are folks.
40:05You don't think that you have
40:06a pointer or something.
40:07Oh, actually, let's see if this will.
40:10Yeah.
40:11So,
40:11so you see these bands coming across,
40:13those are basically patients that are
40:15progressing and going on to a second
40:17line treatment what's not shown here.
40:19Just to spare you a little
40:20bit on the visual side,
40:22our patients who are or stopping therapy
40:24and and essentially transitioning to
40:26Hospice or some sort of end of life
40:29care and that's this big bar here.
40:32And then some patients these
40:34little these little ones they're
40:36going to a deescalated regimen.
40:38So they're dropping the.
40:40Arena taken or the oxaliplatin and
40:43so you can really start to see these
40:45patterns of care in the real world data so.
40:49OK,
40:49so.
40:50This is my little advertisement for Humalog.
40:54It's available to you.
40:56You can you can download the whole
40:59thing and and and mess around with
41:01it if you're an academic or non
41:04commercial user and just Google
41:06Hemac dataverse and you'll find it.
41:09Or you can you can use these links.
41:11It's also available through something
41:14called the Odyssey Athena vocabulary.
41:17And and yeah, I mean, we want more users.
41:20There's I think a lot more
41:22that can be done with it.
41:23So along comes a pandemic.
41:26So, so now I want to spend the last
41:29little bit here talking about the
41:32COVID-19 and cancer consortium.
41:34Which yells a member and this
41:36is our mission statement,
41:38which has been the same since
41:40we were created in March 2020,
41:43which is our goal is to collect
41:44and disseminate prospective,
41:45granular, uniformly organized
41:46information on people with cancer
41:48who are diagnosed with COVID-19 at
41:50scale and as rapidly as possible.
41:52But what I want to talk about
41:53here for a minute is sort of what
41:55I call the ancillary goals of
41:56C19 or the unwritten goals.
41:59So one of those was, you know,
42:00can we build a consortium,
42:02can we build an airplane while also flying?
42:05Just, you know, can we do it?
42:06That was the question.
42:07Convening a group of stakeholders
42:09was really in, you know,
42:11a goal including patients,
42:12really engaging patients and then.
42:15Pertinent to the talk today,
42:17can we demonstrate the additive value of
42:19real world data elements that are not
42:21easily obtained from structured EMR data?
42:22We knew that there were other efforts
42:24kind of getting rolling that were based
42:26on what was in that structured data.
42:28If you remember that's the.
42:31The tiny little blue bars right
42:34on the graph I showed you.
42:37So we wanted to, you know,
42:38get more than that. So this is.
42:43This is back in back in Rhode Island.
42:46Alright.
42:46Showed you Eli Whitney earlier.
42:48This is the this is Slater Mill
42:50in Pawtucket which I think I
42:53pronounced correctly but I'm
42:55getting my New England shops.
42:57And and what's interesting to me about
43:00this story is that he earned this name,
43:02Samuel Shredder Slater and and the
43:05reason he was branded as a traitor
43:08is that he was accused of stealing
43:11the ideas for industrialization.
43:14From from the from the,
43:16from England where he was born and grew up,
43:20and then replicating it in America.
43:22So this is really the beginning of
43:25the American Industrial Revolution.
43:27But what's interesting about that is
43:29that he didn't exactly steal the ideas.
43:32Like he didn't steal blueprints
43:33or things like that.
43:34He just like memorized them and
43:37brought the knowledge with him.
43:39So it's, you know, that's that's what he did.
43:42So. I think that that's great actually.
43:46And so you know when we think
43:48about C 19 and I certainly don't
43:49have time to go through all this,
43:51but we have many inspirations he,
43:55the hemlock,
43:56what I just spoke about is one of them.
43:58But in all the domains of C19,
44:01we are borrowing best ideas,
44:04modifying sometimes and putting
44:07together this consortium and and
44:09this is just sort of a list of that.
44:12The other thing I wanted to
44:13say about you know
44:14the C 19. Work and just,
44:15you know, research in general
44:18is that sponsors are critical.
44:20In a Samuel Slater's case,
44:22he had a sponsor named Moses
44:23Brown who basically fronted him
44:25the money to build those mills.
44:26And our sponsor is Julie Klem at the
44:29NCI who didn't front us any money but
44:32was very supportive and helped us kind of,
44:36you know, surface and socialize our ideas.
44:39So this is our.
44:40This is our data schema,
44:43and what I want to emphasize here related
44:45to this talk is that everything in red.
44:47Is not available in structured data,
44:50so as we sort of built this up.
44:53You know,
44:53some of these things you can collect,
44:55you know, in many different ways.
44:56But the red items.
44:57And you'll see in a few slides
44:59that those turn out to be critical
45:01things like ECOG performance status,
45:03things like toxicity of
45:06cancer treatment pneumonitis.
45:08Items like that,
45:09that we really wanted to zero in on.
45:12I'm going to skip this slide.
45:12I'm going to skip this and
45:15I'm going to just say that.
45:17We've done really pretty well on capturing
45:19what I would call elusive variables.
45:21So these are kind of the
45:23things that they're in the ER,
45:25but they're in that unstructured.
45:27Leak of data,
45:28but we we got a lot of them.
45:31So cancer status is the patient.
45:34Getting better,
45:35getting worse or staying this,
45:37you know the same as before,
45:38a stable disease.
45:39We have that in over 95% of the patients.
45:41Even smoking status is hard to get right.
45:44We have that.
45:46Did COVID affects the patients
45:48treatment plants that's not going to
45:50be unstructured data necessarily.
45:52We have over 90% on that on the ECOG
45:55which is a notorious notoriously
45:57difficult thing to get and and all
46:00the various efforts such as flat
46:01iron and and so forth have had
46:03had challenging and cancer link
46:04have had challenges with this.
46:06We have we have ECOG data on 88%
46:09although that does that includes
46:10patients who just didn't have
46:12any ECOG recorded but we that
46:13knowledge of no ECOG is still.
46:15Knowledge,
46:16right?
46:18And you know getting to our
46:20getting to our results again in
46:22just focus on the red and what
46:24we found is that these factors,
46:26these elusive factors are really important.
46:28And so this is unadjusted
46:31just kind of descriptive.
46:32If you had progressing cancer at
46:35baseline you get COVID your 30
46:37day mortality is 26% and if you
46:39had an ECOG of two or higher your
46:41your mortality is extremely high.
46:45And we also found that immunosuppression
46:48which is a somewhat nebulous
46:52definition and we have our
46:54definition here which is complex,
46:56which includes a lot of things you
46:58can't easily get out of structured data.
47:00So this is sort of the real
47:02world data is a is a huge,
47:04is a huge driver of of mortality.
47:08And if you look at the right on the right,
47:11the, the yellow table basically
47:12those are the patients who are
47:14immunosuppressed at baseline.
47:16And across the board,
47:17even younger patients have
47:19substantial mortality in our data set.
47:24Furthermore, if you add on
47:26top of that active cancer.
47:28So are they immunosuppressed
47:29and they have active cancer.
47:30Again, we have our definition for that.
47:34Because if you're not immunosuppressed
47:36and you have inactive cancer,
47:37in our data, at least you have a
47:39zero chance of dying in the 30 days,
47:42whereas if you're older immunosuppressed,
47:43your chance goes all the way up to 30%.
47:45So really a huge spread here
47:47based on these these data.
47:50And then if we start to look at.
47:53Multivariable adjusted analysis.
47:54Again, we see that these factors
47:58like ECOG or cancer status are are
48:01highly associated with outcome,
48:03both mortality as well as severity,
48:05which means hospitalization,
48:07intubation and so forth.
48:09We saw this as well more recently when
48:11we looked at vaccinated patients.
48:13So patients who are getting
48:15breakthrough COVID-19 after vaccine
48:16again we saw things like cancer
48:19status really you know being a,
48:20you know huge adjusted odds ratio
48:23there of six if you had an active and
48:26progressing cancer of of dying in 30 days.
48:31So I could talk about COVID
48:33C19 itself for an hour,
48:35but I'm going to pause and so I just
48:38want to share some parting thoughts.
48:40So, first of all, I think I'm,
48:43I'm a, you know, I'm, I'm,
48:44I'm a believer here that real
48:46world data has a great potential
48:48to yield real-world evidence if.
48:50We approach it with an understanding
48:51about the completeness issues,
48:52the accuracy issues,
48:54and we anticipate them and we come
48:56up with either ways to adjust for
48:58them or or avoid certain data,
49:02certain variables in the first place.
49:05We need a so.
49:07Yes, we need automated methods, right?
49:09Like, it wouldn't be great if NLP
49:11and a computer could do everything,
49:12but in reality a lot of real world
49:14data and real world evidence
49:16depends on human curators going
49:18into EHR's pulling out that data.
49:20And to do that we need rigorous approaches.
49:23We have a paper published earlier
49:25this year describing the approach
49:26we used in ACR Genie.
49:27I encourage you to check that out.
49:29It basically gets into.
49:31You know you need directives.
49:33You need you need two people
49:35to to independently curate the
49:37same record at a certain rate so
49:40you can see if you know there's
49:43comparability between their results.
49:45And so forth.
49:46If if there's widespread adoption
49:48of standards such as M code,
49:50hemac, omop and so forth,
49:52that that will increase the usefulness
49:54of structured data margin markedly.
49:57I think NLP is having a moment.
50:01If you pick up the newspaper nowadays,
50:03like you're going to see our other paper on,
50:05you're going to see an article on chat,
50:07GPT, for example,
50:08which is generative NLP but sort of
50:11the other side of NLP, and then Umm.
50:16You know, really important though,
50:18and I didn't get to touch on this at
50:20all except for the very beginning when
50:22I alluded to disparities and bias.
50:23There's a lot of concern that.
50:26That,
50:26you know,
50:27working with real-world data might
50:29might actually make biases worse that
50:32are already present in that data.
50:34So we need new approaches to to to.
50:38New approaches to deal with that issue.
50:41Just have some acknowledgements here.
50:42So there's two slides here.
50:43So this is my first acknowledgement slide.
50:45I acknowledge the himanka.org
50:47editorial board.
50:49Others that have worked on
50:50it are funding and and Dolly,
50:52which is the creator of some
50:54of those graphics you saw.
50:56And here's our acknowledgement for the C19,
50:58which is a huge endeavor that has more
51:02than 600 active investigators at this point.
51:06And with that,
51:07I will pause for questions.
51:16So I'll I'll start. And can you see
51:21the ones that are online or not?
51:23I do see, yes, yes, I see.
51:27So I I, I don't for a second dispute
51:30the value of real world data in terms
51:33of being able to answer questions,
51:35but I'm struck by the fact that we
51:39have these two extremes we have.
51:41Randomized controlled trials where
51:43we spend a fortune to collect every
51:47last bit of data and you know they
51:52cost $15,000 per patient or more.
51:56And we get lots of useless data as
51:59part of it. And then we then say,
52:02well, we can't do get everything
52:04from randomized controlled trials.
52:06So then we go to real world data
52:09where everything's pretty messy
52:10and you have to make all these
52:12assumptions and clean up the data.
52:14And the the question is,
52:17is there a role for much simpler randomized
52:22trials done as part of standard?
52:26Practice.
52:29I mean sure, yeah,
52:30I mean I think the recovery trial,
52:32I mean that they they showed that you
52:34can do these huge pragmatic trials
52:37in 10s of thousands of patients with
52:40they didn't spend a lot of money.
52:41I mean they used off the shelf drugs,
52:43right, dexamethason you know things.
52:46Some of the drugs we won't,
52:47we won't say the words but you
52:48know and things like oxygen right.
52:50But when you get into the you
52:52know the expensive drugs that
52:53are not yet FDA approved,
52:54I think that's a whole other area but.
52:57I I think that FDA has got to lead
53:00the way in some ways here because they
53:02and I didn't get to talk about this,
53:05but you know,
53:06there's a high profile rejection
53:08of real-world data within the
53:09last month or two that.
53:11You know,
53:11there was an attempt to get something
53:12approved based on some real-world data.
53:14And I think they rightly looked at that
53:15and they said that this particular
53:17set of data is not trustworthy
53:18and we're not going to go for it.
53:19But I don't think that that should
53:21shut down the whole endeavor.
53:23I think that they need,
53:24they need,
53:24we need guidance from them and
53:26and and you know about what
53:29components should and should not be,
53:31you know, collected routinely.
53:32I think that might simplify things a lot.
53:36Attempt to put together criteria that
53:38that would allow you to say that this.
53:41This set of real world data is adequate
53:44to Brock inclusions from you know,
53:47in terms of how much it has to be cleaned up,
53:49how large the sample size has to be.
53:54I think. It it's such an interesting
53:58question and I'm I'm not aware of of
54:01anything at this moment but I do you
54:03know we are there's this great bias
54:05that I just learned about called the
54:08informed presence bias which I kind of
54:10knew I knew it but not by those words
54:12but that basically means that patients
54:14who spend a lot of time in the clinic
54:17or the medical system have a lot of data
54:19right whereas those that don't don't
54:21and and and it's and and it's actually
54:24an incredibly important source of.
54:26The bias? That. That.
54:30You know, can you?
54:31So if a patient doesn't spend enough
54:33time to get enough data generated,
54:35that's something we should know.
54:37That's something we need to know, right?
54:38But that's almost that kind of,
54:40you know, descriptor is almost
54:42never available in in any real world
54:44data study to my knowledge, so.
54:47The online version.
54:53Yeah.
55:07Schedule.
55:11What is?
55:16COVID-19.
55:28Yeah. Yeah. So the question is,
55:32it seems to be the case that the
55:34patients with the pre-existing cancer
55:37having worse outcomes during the COVID
55:40era than before and why might that be?
55:43I can say from our consortium now we
55:44only look at patients who had COVID.
55:46So that's a subset, right?
55:47Well, as time goes on,
55:49it's going to be everybody maybe.
55:50But what we do see is that you know at
55:53least in our registry 40% of patients
55:55have their treatment altered in
55:57some way and usually that's a delay.
56:00But sometimes they can't get the
56:02same treatment that they were getting
56:04before a surgery gets cancelled,
56:06you know etcetera, etcetera.
56:08And and we know from you know previous work,
56:11obviously the treatment delays don't
56:13usually ever. Work out very well.
56:15So we haven't yet systematically
56:17evaluated that,
56:18but we have you know now several
56:20thousands of those patients.
56:21So we're going to be looking at
56:23that probably in the upcoming year.
56:24As far as other patients, well,
56:27I mean and there were a lot of practice
56:30changes, right, especially in.
56:34Especially in China, I think,
56:35but also with sort of substituting
56:38oral medications whenever possible,
56:40even if they were sort of known
56:42to be inferior or not, you know,
56:44not quite as good so that patients
56:46didn't have to come into the.
56:47To the clinic.
56:48So that's been presented on in
56:50in in some settings,
56:52but you know I think what we think that
56:54those substitutions are are generally OK,
56:56I know that.
56:58You know a lot of people went on
57:01neoadjuvant hormone therapy and
57:02instead of going direct to surgery
57:04for early stage breast cancer and
57:06you know so that they could push
57:08this you know during periods of time
57:10when when elective quote UN quote
57:12elective surgeries were shut down.
57:14So all those things probably add up right.
57:17But there's but there's absolutely
57:19a factor of psychology and patients
57:22being afraid to come into the
57:24clinic and you know potentially
57:26again skipping a a treatment or.
57:29So,
57:29so I think.
57:30To answer your question is that it's
57:33quite complex but I think we need to
57:35understand it better and of course
57:38new diagnosis coming in which we're
57:40starting to get that information.
57:42There's clearly a stage migration and and
57:44you know to later stage more more advanced,
57:46more metastatic disease.
57:48Because of delays in screening and so forth.
57:51So.
57:51So I think we're going to face a
57:53we're going to face a challenging
57:54decade and I you know I think Ned
57:56Sharpless forecast that at the
57:57very beginning of the pandemic.
57:58I think in the first month or two he
58:00wrote a paper and nature of science
58:01I think you know modeling out what
58:03what that might look like and and
58:05and you know that's probably going to
58:07that's probably going to come true but.
58:10Hopefully COVID ends really soon.
58:13So. Um, yeah.
58:20Seems like.
58:31Yeah so we're so we're overtime and and
58:33I think you know I mean there's there's
58:35many strategies to try to mitigate but
58:37you can't you can't eliminate bias right.
58:39So you you can understand it you
58:41can try to mitigate it there's you
58:43know there's matching strategies to
58:44if you're doing sort of a you know
58:46case and control style approach where
58:48you you try to make the controls as
58:50similar to the cases you know and
58:52everything but the. Closure.
58:54So you know and and and some of those are,
58:56some of those been around for decades,
58:58some of those are kind of
59:00emerging at this point.
59:01But I don't think we can forget that there's
59:04bias in in perspective trials as well, right.
59:08So I mean I think either side
59:10of the of the coin.
59:13Yeah, it's just, it's just,
59:14it's just one more thing and it's
59:15not the only, I mean it's there's
59:17also there's ascertainment,
59:18but I mean there's a lot of biases,
59:20right and. You know, one thing we've
59:22worked on with our consortium is developing
59:25standardized language around limitations,
59:27which I think is critical because you know.
59:31I mean, the data is the data are
59:34the data use the plural, right? But.
59:37But the way it's presented really
59:40does influence the reader, right?
59:42So. So that's something we're
59:43thinking about and might have some.
59:45You know, thought pieces or something
59:47coming out about about how to handle that.