M.D. Anderson Cancer Center

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has one mission– to eliminate cancer. The Center provides outstanding programs that integrate patient care, research and prevention, and through education for undergraduate and graduate students, trainees, professionals, employees and the public.

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“The whole idea with big data is to begin to pull together an understanding of the genome along with the patient’s clinical care. If we understand the biochemical basis for different tumor types, we can apply the appropriate therapy to each patient.”

— Dr. John Frenzel, Chief Medical Information Officer

Business Need

MD Anderson launched the Moon Shots Program to target six forms of cancer with large multi-disciplinary clinical and research teams. Goal is to make inroads against the disease, improve survival and quality of life for patients.

The organization supports and accelerates the iterative scientific process by harnessing big data, reducing clinical trial cohort selection from weeks to minutes, and speeding time to discovery of evidence.

MD Anderson is accelerating the implementation of personalized cancer medicine, by rapidly disseminating changes and improvements in clinical practice to improve patient outcomes globally.

Challenges

Create a single source of hugely disparate longitudinal patient data, operational data and genomic data to power insight discovery, clinical decision support and business analytics.

Define a data governance process that ensures important data assets are formally managed and protected throughout the enterprise.