CancerX is a public-private partnership announced by The White House as a national accelerator to boost innovation in the fight against cancer as part of the reignited Cancer Moonshot.
Socially Determined is proud to be among the founding members of CancerX, announced today at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual conference. We have the privilege of joining a diverse and distinguished group of organizations collaborating to unleash the power of digital innovation to design and create a future that's free of the burden of cancer.
A month after launching in February 2023, CancerX announced its co-hosts: Moffitt Cancer Center and the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe), alongside the Office for the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH). It also announced its inaugural project, “Advancing Digital Innovation to Improve Equity and Reduce Financial Toxicity in Cancer Care and Research,” which has begun work to assess, quantify, and enhance the impact of digital solutions on cancer care cost, access, and outcomes dimensions.
Improving equity in the fight against cancer is a cornerstone of the mission of CancerX. As a founding member, Socially Determined brings extensive expertise using data and analytics to better understand the impact social factors have on healthcare cost and outcomes – experience we can apply to the CancerX mission.
There are several ways social risk analytics can be applied to better understand and improve equity in cancer care and treatment. To start, as new cancer therapies are being developed, social risk data can help innovative life sciences companies ensure that clinical trials are inclusive and truly representative of diverse populations. In a similar way, this data can also help understand how social factors impact medication adherence. More broadly, it can give all stakeholders – payers, providers, life science companies, government organizations and others – visibility to see how social factors are impacting the cost and outcomes of cancer care.
As DiMe CEO, Jennifer Goldsack, commented in a recent Q&A:
In order to truly care for an individual with cancer, we need to go beyond contemplating just patients’ clinical care. We know that there are stories whereby someone’s child is diagnosed with cancer and they end up selling their house and sleeping in their car outside of the Cancer Center in order to access care. That isn’t contemplated by a CPT code. There are costs that we don’t see.
We couldn’t agree more, and for various reasons these things are hard to see through traditional approaches. This is why social risk data is essential and we’re so proud to be bringing our expertise in this area as a founding member of CancerX.