Improving precision cancer care through research

Feature Stories | 12 Jul 2024

Precision oncology is a cancer care framework that aims to develop and deliver treatments that are guided by the biological characteristics of each individual patient’s tumour, providing personalized care. To capitalize on the promise of precision oncology and improve outcomes for cancer patients, the quality of care delivered must reach the highest attainable standard.

To help assess and improve the quality of precision oncology care in Canada, the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network (MOHCCN) is funding a national team of scientists whose goal is to develop patient-centred consensus-based clinical quality indicators to be used as national standards for precision oncology. The team is led by Drs Timothy Hanna (Queen’s University), Yvonne Bombard (University of Toronto and Unity Health Toronto) and Winson Cheung (University of Calgary).

Dr. Hanna, the Clinical Teachers’ Association of Queen’s (CTAQ) Chair in Applied Health Economics and Policy, emphasizes that this work “holds great promise to improve access to care, equity of care and value of care for the benefit of all Canadian cancer patients.

“It will also help position Canada as a global leader in high-quality precision oncology care, and future studies measuring quality indicators identified by our team as part of clinical trials will also help establish Canada as a competitive and ideal location for precision medicine trials.”

Although precision oncology is a rapidly expanding field, quality evaluations in this area remain understudied. There are few established quality indicators that are specific to precision oncology, and those that do exist are concentrated in common cancer types and do not consider important aspects such as equity of access to testing and treatment, test quality and quality of life. There is therefore a need to develop broader, more generalizable measures of quality that are applicable across cancer types and testing technologies.

To begin to address this need, the study will build pan-Canadian experience in developing quality indicators for precision oncology. The team will start by conducting interviews with adult cancer patients to understand their perspectives on quality in precision oncology. Drawing from these interviews and their own experience with precision oncology, the team will then develop a list of candidate quality indicators based on consensus input from the two groups (patients and providers).

This approach, and especially the involvement of cancer patients in the process, will ensure that the final list reflects patient-centred quality indicators that reflect patient values and priorities. While recruiting participants, the team will also seek broad representation of person and disease characteristics that may influence views on quality of care – such as age, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, geography (e.g. province, rurality), cancer type and cancer stage – to incorporate diverse perspectives and promote equity in the development, definition and measurement of these quality indicators.

The project will focus on the clinical aspects of precision oncology care that involve the use of comprehensive genomic profiling.

“Quality cancer care refers to care that is safe, equitable, effective, efficient, timely and patient-centred," explains Dr. Cheung. “By identifying key quality indicators that are relevant to patients and providers, this project will enable downstream evaluations and optimization of quality care to improve outcomes for cancer patients.”

A longer version of this story originally appeared on Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network.

Learn more about Global Cancer Control, Dr. Hanna's Research Excellence Cluster at Queen's Health Sciences.

Improving precision cancer care through research

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