Dr Stuart Goldberg Explains Differences Between COTA and Traditional Data Analysis Tools

Data from electronic health records aren’t always helpful for oncologists, which is why the founders of Cancer Outcomes Tracking and Analysis (COTA) developed a platform that stratifies patients by relevant characteristics, said Stuart Goldberg, MD, chief medical officer, COTA, John Theurer Cancer Center.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What makes the COTA platform different from traditional data analysis programs?

Today most people use electronic health records, and they were really set up for billing purposes. They’re all based on IC-9 or IC-10, which are very broad characteristics that are helpful to the billing coders, but not insightful to the oncologist. So we’ve developed an entire system that’s based on stratifying the patients by the patient characteristics. It could be the size of the tumor, it could be genomics, it could be patient factors, like heart disease or diabetes.

We put all that into a digital code so that then we can do analytics. That’s very different than just boiling the ocean, looking for some type of insight to come out. As oncologists, when we founded COTA, we understood what we needed to look for, and we organized the patients around oncology-specific factors that every oncologist would understand readily.