BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Syntropy, a technology company specializing in healthcare data integration and collaboration solutions, today announced it is joining forces with MITRE to provide data integration support for the mCODE™ (minimal Common Oncology Data Elements) data standard. The partnership seeks to improve the overall quality and consistency of cancer data available to clinicians, patients, researchers, and other stakeholders in the fight against cancer.
Today, more than 18 million people are living with cancer globally, with thousands of additional cases diagnosed every day. While there is a vast array of data available to support oncology research and clinical care, the majority of it is contained in electronic health records (EHRs), which are not always uniform in the way they collect, analyze and store data. The lack of standardized workflows, ontologies, and integrations has significantly hindered data’s true impact and potential in oncology. Cancer centers can use Syntropy for data integration and data modeling, but they often devote significant time and resources to the process of cleaning, structuring, and linking their data.
mCODE’s core set of structured data elements for oncology establishes minimum recommended standards for the structure and content of health record information across use cases and users. Bringing a common data standard to the oncology community enables clinicians to capture critical information for downstream uses. That means any researcher or clinician can start using Syntropy’s platform to quickly connect to enriched data sets and collaborate using a standard, shared data language.
“Our work with MITRE on mCODE is a natural alliance as we are both focused on revolutionizing the oncology landscape by helping researchers unlock the value of their data,” said James Kugler, Director of Syntropy. “By working with MITRE to pair Syntropy with mCODE, we are providing a novel, industry-leading infrastructure that simplifies and accelerates collaboration-driven insights for cancer centers across the United States.”
With mCODE, clinicians can capture and commonly define key data points for patients throughout clinical workflows and at every patient interaction. This helps facilitate research and collaboration to improve future care, leading to better therapies, reduced costs and enhanced outcomes overall. Through the support of the mCODE standard, Syntropy will now offer even greater user-friendly insight and data transparency for researchers and cancer centers. Syntropy, which provides a holistic view of organizations’ complete data landscape, will help users more easily interpret collected data by combining scattered data silos and integrating them under a common ontology aligned with mCODE. Syntropy will also streamline administrative, clinical and research collaborations by providing transparency into the uses of institutional data under granular access controls.
Dr. Jay Schnitzer, MITRE’s chief medical and technology officer, said, “With less than six percent of cancer patients participating in clinical trials and the majority of information collected by EHR systems incompatible, high-quality data for cancer research is severely lacking. By outlining common, foundational data elements, the promise of mCODE is to accelerate interoperable data exchange and enable critical care- and research-based decisions – a vision that Syntropy shares.”
Both MITRE and Syntropy are members of the HL7 accelerator CodeX, a community-wide organization created to expand mCODE through new use cases to address current and emerging operational needs.
About Syntropy
Syntropy is a technology company specializing in healthcare data integration and collaboration solutions aimed at unlocking the value of scientific data. Syntropy serves as a catalyst for change in biomedical research by equipping scientists with more intuitive and effective tools for unlocking the value of their data, while creating an ecosystem that brings together leading scientific experts to win the fight against cancer and countless other diseases. Syntropy is a partnership between EMD Digital Inc., a subsidiary of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany (DAX:MKGAF), and Palantir Technologies Inc. (NYSE:PLTR). Syntropy is headquartered in Cambridge, MA.
About mCODE
The mCODE Initiative, a collaboration between the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Inc. (ASCO®), its wholly owned nonprofit subsidiary CancerLinQ LLC, the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology Foundation (Alliance Foundation), The American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO), and MITRE, has developed and published the set of common cancer data standards and specifications at mCODEinitiative.org.
About MITRE
MITRE’s mission-driven teams are dedicated to solving problems for a safer world. Through our public-private partnerships and federally funded R&D centers, we work across government and in partnership with industry to tackle challenges to the safety, stability, and well-being of our nation. Learn more at mitre.org.
Data Privacy and Ethics
Central to this collaboration on mCODE is both Syntropy and MITRE’s commitments to preserving and promoting the security, privacy, and responsible use of sensitive data. All data access and use by either party occurs in strict accordance with all applicable legal, ethical, and regulatory considerations, for purposes authorized by the data contributors/appropriate data stewards. Clinical use cases, such as the structuring of oncology data elements for inclusion and use in the electronic health record, as pioneered by mCODE, will occur in accordance with all applicable standard operating procedures and regulations for clinical data management and use. In the research context, end users and their sponsoring institutions will be subject to the standard institutional review boards and other applicable ethics review protocols, which will be technically enforced by the Syntropy platform’s data protection capabilities.
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