National Cancer Institute teases AI-assisted cancer care records retrieval
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National Institutes of Health leadership believes AI can help patients identify clinical trials for which they may be eligible.
The National Cancer Institute is considering an initiative called “Every Patient” to obtain cancer-related information for every U.S. patient treated for cancer, its director said Thursday.
NCI has 74 designated cancer centers — which use federal funds to deliver cancer care — and numerous research-oriented cooperative groups , but the agency still misses information about patients, director Anthony Letai said at the Milken Institute Future of Health Summit.
“There's opportunities right now with a confluence of technology, including artificial intelligence, to capture an awful lot of information that's lost,” Letai said.
Letai described Every Patient as “nascent” and cautioned that the agency is still weighing whether to advance it.
A spokesperson for the National Institutes of Health, NCI’s parent agency, did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
NCI is not the only agency mulling how to advance richer, more complete copies of patient health information. Other agencies, such as the Veterans Affairs and Defense departments, have decided to use the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement — or TEFCA — to improve their ability to obtain and share health data.
Letai explained other opportunities for AI to support NCI’s mission.
NCI and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health announced a $200 million effort to develop a therapeutic cancer vaccine that helps patients’ immune systems attack tumors after a cancer diagnosis. The project wants to test how AI can aid a therapeutic platform, Letai said.
An executive summary for the initiative adds that AI could help discover antigens, which are markers that tell your immune system if something is harmful. AI will also serve as part of the “digital backbone of the initiative,” it says.
Letai said AI could also help patients identify clinical trials for which they are eligible, noting that AI is already sifting through patient medical records with consent.
NCI and another NIH component — the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences — have funded the integration of AI into electronic health records that look up what clinical trials patients are eligible for, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said during an afternoon keynote. He did not name specific programs through which NIH has spent money on that use case.
“Lots and lots of our portfolio is shifting toward AI because it is the most revolutionary tool there is, I've seen, in biomedicine in quite a long time,” Bhattacharya said.