Consolidating Cancer Care Information in a Single Electronic Database

In a conversation with CancerNetwork®, Leila Tchelebi, MD, a radiation oncologist at Northwell Health, discussed the rationale for assessing the use of a comprehensive cancer database across multiple research and care centers. She spoke in the context of findings that she presented in a poster session at the 2025 American Society for Radiation Oncology Annual Meeting.

Tchelebi described how her research aimed to reduce the time and effort that clinicians usually spend on chasing down information in multiple medical records across several different inpatient and outpatient operations. Using a platform called Oncora, Tchelebi and colleagues demonstrated the feasibility of consolidating data from a variety of disparate electronic medical records (EMRs).

Transcript:

One of the troubles in medicine is that information that can be essential for patient care is distributed amongst different medical records that do not necessarily interface with one another, which results in a lot of extra time and effort for clinicians to chase down the information in the various medical records. This becomes particularly problematic at a large health system such as Northwell, where we have multiple hospitals on the inpatient and the outpatient side, different labs, and different places where patients can get imaging studies done. If you need to collect all the data for an individual patient from these various places, faxes get involved, and [you] have to collect [them]. You cannot always get the records electronically, and it becomes a big mess and a challenge for multiple areas of care, not only the care in the clinic, but as far as research you might want to conduct. The cancer registry collects information on patients that is required to be submitted nationally to state and government registries, so there are many reasons why all of a patient’s relevant medical history needs to be consolidated into 1 easy-to-find place, if possible.

The purpose of this research was to see if it was feasible. There is a database that has been created; it’s called Oncora. [It] collects data from these disparate EMRs. The question was, can we utilize those data in an effective means across our cancer network? That was our goal: to see if it was feasible, to see if this could be done, and if it would be useful. We found that, in fact, it truly is.

The database is available at a particular website that is institution-specific. Northwell has an Oncora interface that we are able to access. There are [several] data elements already there; those get imported into the database, and then you can extract them based on the inquiry that you input. If there are variables that are missing—for example, another research project that we presented at ASTRO required some lab values that were not already existing in the database—we are able to contact the creators of the database, and then they can work with their team to extract those data. Truly, it seems to be limitless as far as what data can be imported. If it is not already there, it can be added.

Reference

Tchelebi L, Lindsay WD, Yee K, Wishinsky J, Labarca ME, Potters L. Building a comprehensive cancer database across fourteen treatment facilities in a large health care system. Presented at: 2025 American Society for Radiation Oncology Annual Meeting; September 27-October 1, 2025; San Francisco, CA.