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Booz Allen Hamilton, a leading health care consultant to the federal government, is assisting the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in managing a breakthrough project that is creating a community of experts and organizations to share critical information on cancer research.

And this initiative is anything but conventional: Many believe it has the potential to help transform cancer into a chronic, manageable disease within a decade.

The effort is called the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid™, or caBIG™. caBIG™ uses information technology (IT) to enable large amounts of diverse biological data to be collected, analyzed, and shared. By employing common data standards, open-source principles, open architectures, and so on, caBIG™ reduces the technical and communications barriers to innovation within the cancer community.

caBIG™ is improving the effectiveness of clinical trials by simplifying the sharing of information. As NCI’s contractor/program manager, Booz Allen is assisting 51 cancer centers—including centers such as Sloan-Kettering and the Mayo Clinic—in developing data standards and tools for IT interoperability that will strengthen collaboration and advances in the health arena.

“NCI has a vision of what caBIG™ could mean to effective cancer research, new drug development, and—ultimately—treatment,” says Booz Allen Principal Chalk Dawson. “Booz Allen is providing to the NCI the program management and domain expertise support to take that vision and give it form, shape, and function.”

Booz Allen’s domain expertise support includes management and science consulting, biomedical informatics, engineering, and other disciplines to offer guidance in clinical trial management systems, imaging systems, tissue banks and pathology tools, integrative cancer research tools, vocabularies and ontologies, and systems architecture.

“From Bench to Bedside and Back Again”

caBIG™ has the potential to redefine how cancer research is conducted and possibly how care is provided, as well as accelerate cancer prevention, early detection, and treatment. And the benefits of caBIG™ will extend beyond its own community: Data sets and information will be available to anyone in biomedical research, and caBIG™ infrastructure and tools have wide utility beyond cancer. 

“caBIG™ promises to reduce the gap between research and treatment,” says Dawson. “New scientific tools, research methodologies, and treatment protocols are constantly being developed. Using biomedical informatics, an environment to facilitate the sharing of information and tools between basic science researchers and clinicians is evolving, and this will inform and improve clinical trials.”

Biomedical informatics tools will also help restructure currently incompatible data formats and messaging systems so that crucial information contained in data sets is immediately useable for any organization, subject to applicable privacy and security requirements. By working closely with the research communities to develop standardized data models around important data categories, a solid foundation is being constructed to integrate existing systems and develop new interoperable tools.

Health Information Technology: Improving the Efficiency of Healthcare

The healthcare industry is currently challenged by high costs, inconsistent quality, and a fragmented environment—hamstrung by an inability to share research data and electronic medical records. There is no common infrastructure to collect and share data from cancer centers, hospitals, clinicians, physicians, and other individuals and organizations.

But health information technology (HIT) has the potential to improve the quality, access, and efficiency of healthcare by creating interoperability between systems. HIT promises to revolutionize healthcare by reducing errors, accelerating information exchange, and creating data standards, which will make information available in a secure manner across the nation and, in time, around the world.

An important precursor of this process, caBIG™ is contributing data standards, technology standards, tools, and infrastructure that can facilitate the sharing of medical and biomedical research knowledge from the bench, to bedside, and back again.

Says Booz Allen Vice President Robin Portman, “Data standardization could allow research breakthroughs to be shared quickly with physicians and improve the quality of patient care. Findings can be then returned back to researchers for analysis, and patient treatments can be adjusted immediately for better results. Interoperability and collaborative science could enable the process to happen much faster.”

It is important that scientists, researchers, and clinicians employ collaborative science—sharing information seamlessly—so they can collect the data that will influence patient care in the future. Information sharing and technology standardization is the foundation of caBIG™. “Clinical data and technology interoperability enables collaborative science, which is changing the paradigm of how clinical research is conducted,” says Portman. “And Booz Allen is on the cutting edge of it.”

Clinical Interoperability: Taking Center Stage

The topic of interoperability was at the forefront of the November 2005 conference for the World Health Care Innovation and Technology Congress (WHITC), a global forum for best practices to improve the healthcare system.

WHITC aligns itself with thought leaders in the use of IT in health care, and welcomed Booz Allen as Platinum Sponsor of the event. Portman introduced a panel on “Interoperability and Integration Strategies,” which included Kenneth Buetow, PhD, NCI Associate Director for Bioinformatics and Information Technology.

At the Washington, D.C. conference, caBIG™ was just one of the initiatives featured that has the potential to transform healthcare. A relatively new initiative, caBIG™ is a three-year pilot that was launched in February 2004 as part of a five-year NIH contract with Booz Allen. It is funded by NCI, with the majority of the funds channeled directly to the cancer centers for activities such as pilots for testing new IT, developing cancer research tools, and sharing information.

In its first year, caBIG™ launched 75 projects and developed infrastructure for the cancer research community. In its second year, caBIG™ developed IT tools to build solutions faster and more efficiently for immediate “pain points,” or weak junctures, in the clinical trial process. For example, the project is making it easier to integrate and analyze data sets from various sources. It is also simplifying the process of tracking and reporting adverse events to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Development of more than 24 new products, including clinical trial solutions, tissue banks, and integrative cancer research applications and multiple data sets, were launched and/or delivered in Year 2, and will be available to the broader research community as well as caBIG™ participants.

The project started its third year in March 2006, and is now focused on delivering “real solutions for real problems.” “Real” problems, says Portman, are research issues whose solutions are a high priority for the cancer community.

“We’ll be creating cross-cutting solutions to further enable research,” says Dawson. “For example, clinical trial information is currently collected in three categories: Clinical trial outcomes data, biospecimen and annotation data, and information resulting from analysis of this data. Assembling that data is complex and must provide end-to-end traceability. In year three and henceforth, caBIG™ will focus on end-to-end solutions and approaches to address these issues.”

caBIG™ is already extending to a wider community, including the FDA and pharmaceutical companies, further benefiting cancer patients and accelerating research to substantially reduce the suffering associated with the disease.

“This is the type of project that makes one passionate about his job,” says Dawson.

story posted June 7, 2006

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