The Chief Research Information Officer of Penn’s Institute of Biomedical Informatics (IBI) and a Department of Genetics researcher were speakers at a Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation (PC3I) seminar aimed at increasing the accuracy of patient classifications and the coherence of patient data files.

IBI’s Danielle Mowery, PhD, MS, and the Penn Medicine Department of Medicine Department of Genetics’ Kara Maxwell, MD, PhD, discussed how clinical and translational research and patient data is made more difficult to understand and work with because of widely dispersed and often siloed data practices.

“This is the one of the most intractable challenges to unleashing the potential of data from the electronic health record to improve the health and health care of our patients,” said Justin Bekelman, MD, Director of PC3I. “The solutions that Drs. Mowery and Maxwell are pushing forward are applicable to every health system, health-tech and biotech company, and payer seeking to accelerate and derive value from personalized cancer care.”

In presentation to two dozen Penn scientists, Mowery and Maxwell outlined new informatics strategies for  unifying clinical and genomic information from disparate data sources related to cancer patients and their care.