How Can AI Help Cancer Practices Improve Care and Clinical Research?

For oncology practices, clinical care and clinical research are increasingly interconnected. Dr. Shaalan Beg, CMO, oncology, ConcertAI, said that clinical trials can often represent the best available care for patients with cancer, making tools that support both routine care and research particularly valuable.

“When we think about AI and automation, there are a couple of different analogies that are thrown out there,” Beg said. Beg compared the role of AI and automation to lane assist, helping physicians stay on course by surfacing relevant information and alerting them when they may be moving away from established goals.

Beg said this approach can support several priorities for cancer centers, including research, clinical trial enrollment, and quality improvement. CancerLinQ’s network includes NCI-designated Cancer Centers such as the University of Colorado and University of Rochester Medical Center, which use the network to support research using curated datasets, real-world evidence projects, and efforts to streamline clinical trial enrollment.

The technology can also support quality initiatives, Beg said, including efforts related to ASCO certification or quality programs developed within individual practices.

Eron Kelly, CEO of ConcertAI, added that the CancerLinQ Suite uses AI to curate and synthesize information across the CancerLinQ network, with the goal of delivering relevant information to physicians when they need it.

“What we're doing with the CancerLinQ Suite is we're using AI to curate and synthesize massive amounts of information across the entire CancerLinQ network, and then we're providing the right information at the right time to that physician,” Kelly said.

That could include helping identify patients who may be eligible for clinical trials or giving physicians access to information about care options based on cohorts of patients across the network.

For Kelly, the broader goal is not to replace clinical decision-making, but to give physicians better information to inform it.

“That’s what we're doing, and that's the goal of the CancerLinQ environment, is to help provide, again, that right information at the right time, so physicians can make better-informed decisions.”

Watch part 1 of this interview here.
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