A recent press release reports, “MITRE announced Compass™, a first-in-class, open-source application to collect minimal common oncology data elements, or mCODE™, from electronic health records (EHR), today at the HIMSS19 Global Conference & Exhibition. Only three percent of adult cancer patients participate in clinical trials, limiting access to high quality data across multiple types of cancers. mCODE is a new data standard under development that will facilitate breakthrough insights into high-quality data for multiple cancer use cases. ‘Advancements in cancer care and research are being driven by high-quality, sharable data,’ commented Dr. Brian Anderson, chief clinical lead at MITRE. ‘Whereas mCODE is a standardized set of cancer data points within health records, Compass is a tool that extracts that data, organizes, and informs doctors, patients, and researchers’.”

The release continues, “Compass is a SMART (substitutable medical applications and reusable technologies) on FHIR (fast healthcare interoperability resources) application that extracts mCODE data elements from electronic health records to deliver reports to providers and patients – empowering better diagnosis, improved care planning, and shared decision making at the point of care. Most of the nearly 15 million individuals living with cancer in the U.S. have EHRs of some sort. However, many of the 1,500 EHR systems in use are incompatible, limiting the valuable information cancer researchers could pull from these records. Development of the mCODE data standard is led by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), working with MITRE and other stakeholders, to improve data and records interoperability in oncology care and research. An early version of mCODE core elements, reflecting initial use cases, is open for comment and near ready for publication.”

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