Optimizing cancer patient care with advanced analytics

SAS^® Viya^® helps create custom care pathways for Oscar Lambret Center cancer patients

The Oscar Lambret Center, located in Lille, France, is renowned for its cancer treatment and research. The center is one of 18 in the Unicancer Comprehensive Cancer Care Network and is a national authority on cancer treatment and oncology research. The center has 220 beds, treats 24,000 patients each year and has nearly 1,000 employees.

As part of a research project, the center wanted to set up personalized care pathways. Care pathways help physicians make decisions on how to care for a certain type of patient. Creating personalized care pathways allows for higher quality and more consistent patient care.

Implementing personalized care pathways posed two key challenges. First, a benchmark for standard treatment times needed to be determined by the research team. Delay in care can result in a decreased likelihood of recovery for the patient. Creating standard treatment times allows the center to improve patient care.

Second, the center needed to optimize workforce management to improve patient care. Cancer care involves a multidisciplinary team of physicians and medical professionals. A comprehensive overview of the data is essential for establishing reliable personalized care pathways.

“Before this project, our data was siloed and static,” explains Ali Hammoudi, Medical Management Controller at the Oscar Lambret Center. “The cancer center model, based on multidisciplinary care, involves many players throughout a patient’s journey. To evaluate it, it is necessary to cross-reference data from various tools. We were looking for a solution capable of combining all necessary data for the creation of performance measures, then of proposing clear and dynamic restitutions. It is for these reasons that we opted for the SAS Viya platform, in addition to its flexibility of use.”

A smooth transfer of skills guaranteed autonomous ease of use

Above all, this care pathways project is a business project. The second half of 2018 was devoted to interviews with the center’s doctors and the definition of care pathways. In January 2019, the teams set up the methodological framework to formalize the pathways described by the practitioners, as well as the desired metrics for steering the pathways.

“Training in SAS Viya and setting up the pilot required support,” says Hammoudi. “Doctors were key players throughout the project, first by expressing their needs, then by supporting the chief information officer during the acceptance phase of the pilot. This first dashboard was delivered in September 2019. From the creation of the second dashboard, we could see that we were already sufficiently autonomous. Since then, we have delivered more than 20 dashboards independently.”

Practitioners now have SAS Visual Analytics dashboards available to their specialties, allowing them to monitor the care pathways of their patients. “Each referring doctor or specialty coordinator can self-sufficiently use the dashboard, which is updated daily. Being able to access recent data and performance measures is one of the major benefits of this care pathways project and SAS Viya,” says Hammoudi.

Better patient care is powered by advanced analytics

The modeling and monitoring of care pathways enable personalized medicine. This, among other things, results in improved patient outcomes. “Bringing benefits to patients is at the heart of everything we do,” says Hammoudi. “It is important to register patients as soon as they arrive for them to have a tailored care pathway. The pathway will be shared with the patient, and they will be guided throughout their treatment. The performance measures allow us to objectively measure compliance with the recommendations for care quality and safety. If necessary, we can also apply corrective measures to improve the care of our patients.”

Thanks to the support of the general management, the president of the Institutional Medical Commissions of Hospitals, the practitioners, the Medical Information Department and the CIO, the project became a success. “One of the elements that explains this adhesion to SAS Viya was our ability to ask practitioners what they needed to take better care of patients,” says Hammoudi. “With SAS, we have the capability to translate needs and metrics into personalized medicine, visible on dashboards.”

The Oscar Lambret Center does not intend to stop there. “We will, of course, continue to bring this project to life,” says Hammoudi. “Currently, we have launched other SAS Viya projects with doctors around data mining and machine learning. For example, we are working on a text mining tool that will analyze documents to identify the medical history of our patients.”

The implementation of SAS Viya for the patient care pathways project has been a game changer for the Oscar Lambret Center. With this powerful analytics tool, the center has unlocked a world of new possibilities for bringing data-driven insights to the forefront of medical expertise. As the center looks to the future, it will continue to innovate and provide the best possible care to patients.