Hopkins inHealth Draft
September 18, 2014
Oncospace:
A Demonstration Program of the
Johns Hopkins Individualized Health Initiative (Hopkins inHealth)
“Johns Hopkins University will lead the creation and implementation of learning health care
systems, which will be used to increasingly tailor the management of care to each patient’s
unique set of circumstances.” -Johns Hopkins Medicine 2014 Strategic Plan
Johns Hopkins Oncospace
In chess, the combination of a grand master and computer support beats the grand master
or the computer alone, every time. Oncospace, a clinical support tool with roots in
astronomy, is designed to similarly raise the game of clinician grand masters. Oncospace
was created by Johns Hopkins radiation oncologists, computer scientists, and radiation
physicists to better tailor radiation treatments to patients’ unique characteristics and
preferences. The methods were first invented by computational astronomers who
integrated data obtained from many telescopes to create clearer images of the sky.
Likewise, by integrating methods and data from across academic health centers, Oncospace
provides clinicians with a clearer understanding of how to optimize care for their
individual patients. For the first time, Hopkins treatment plans for head and neck cancer
patients are fully informed by careful analysis of the health outcomes of similar patients
from Johns Hopkins and from other academic health centers.
Demonstrated Success
The Oncospace Consortium, currently comprised of Hopkins, the University of
Pennsylvania, and the University of Washington, has already achieved early success. It has
demonstrated the capability of accessing and analyzing patient data from multiple sites
while guaranteeing patient privacy. The patient data never moves; the analyst goes to
Oncospace. The Oncospace program has also implemented interactive, real-time capture of
clinical information on mobile tablets, enabling the seamless integration of new clinical
data into the Oncospace database. The Oncospace team is now beginning work with
collaborators at Toshiba to quantitate radiology images and refine radiation dosing for
each patient.
Now is the time to accelerate the Oncospace program, to quantify the health advantages of
using Oncospace, and then to expand this data-driven treatment paradigm to all Hopkins
and Consortium patients and then to cancer patients around the world.
Hopkins inHealth
Oncospace is a lead demonstration project of the Johns Hopkins Individualized Health
Initiative or Hopkins inHealth, a University, Health System, and Applied Physics Laboratory
signature initiative, launched in October 2012, to develop and demonstrate examples of
data-driven individualized health care. Hopkins inHealth is developing infrastructure in
four core areas: data science, adaptive learning systems powered by health data, targeted
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Hopkins inHealth Draft
September 18, 2014
scientific discovery to address critical health system needs, and healthcare organizational
models to bring the best science to patient care sooner. These cores support flagship
projects or “pilots” in prioritized areas. Through the pilots, Hopkins inHealth will
demonstrate a new way of organizing and delivering health care – by intelligently using
information to individualize and integrate health care delivery.
Significance and impact
The Oncospace program embodies the Hopkins inHealth goal of creating an infrastructure
that will 1) develop novel measures where most needed to improve patient care; 2)
integrate and standardize information obtained from multiple data sources; 3) support
learning about the efficacy and safety of treatments for subsets of similar patients; 4)
support the design and prioritization of randomized clinical trials; and 5) better inform
clinical decisions to improve outcomes.
Widespread implementation of inHealth’s goal has the potential to dramatically improve
healthcare delivery and to make healthcare more affordable. The successful development
of this tool will enhance the utilization of health information for clinical research, decision
support, trainee education, and quality improvement. By using this system, researchers will
be able to more efficiently evaluate the outcomes of care management decisions, enabling
the continued refinement of management options. In particular, it will identify sources of
waste in the system that can be eliminated to decrease healthcare costs. These advances in
how health data are utilized will revolutionize the practice of medicine, leading to more
efficient, effective, safe, and individualized care at Hopkins and throughout the world.
What will it take?
Funding is needed to support the Oncospace Consortium and expand its reach. As an initial
demonstration of the inHealth approach, Oncospace has been focused on Radiation
Oncology. However, the ultimate goal is to further develop the Oncospace program to
support a broad range of health care decision-making. All Johns Hopkins clinical masters
will be able to benefit from Oncospace computer support.
$10 million is needed to expand Oncospace to lung and prostate cancers and to disseminate
that expanded version across academic health centers around the country and world.
Another $10 million will allow us to apply the Oncospace-demonstrated inHealth approach
to interventional cardiology, autoimmune disease treatment and cancer screening, the
three other pilots of the inHealth program.
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