Dr Stuart Goldberg Discusses How COTA Analyzes Oncology Data

Cancer Outcomes Tracking and Analytics (COTA) focuses on stratifying cancer patients by their many subtypes to understand the different treatments, outcomes, and costs for each, according to Stuart Goldberg, MD, chief medical officer, COTA, John Theurer Cancer Center.

Transcript (slightly modified)

Can you provide an overview of COTA (Cancer Outcomes Tracking & Analytics)?

COTA is a data analytics company that has focused on oncology, and really what we’ve understood is that cancer’s not 1 disease. It’s many diseases. So we’ve had to develop a whole new lexicon, a whole new classification system, that stratifies the patients by their individual subtypes. Taking breast cancer from 1 disease to 100s of diseases, because the woman who has HER2/neu positive is very different than the HER2/neu negative, and they have different treatment strategies, different outcomes, and different costs.

By putting all of that information into our system and pulling from the electronic health records, and pulling the unstructured data, the richness of the doctors’ notes, as well as the structured data, like the fields that we fill in like name and date and addresses. By putting all that together and then putting it through a classification system, we can now organize that data so that we can do big data analytics.