If you’re a cancer patient, everything you do — everything your body does — can potentially generate data. The growth or regression of a tumour? That’s information. Your white blood cell count is information. Even your mental state along your journey is information that could be medically useful.
Data fuels innovation. And researchers and oncologists are using patient data to refine and personalize treatment. But as our guest Helen Chen explains our medical data is often siloed in Canada. Fragmented. And it’s not standardized. What can we do to make our data work better for researchers and oncologists in the fight against cancer?
“Data helps inform the research into new treatments from the very early stages, and then later we need data
to
match the treatment to the patient.”
— Helen Chen
in this episode
A Professor in the School of Public Health and Health Systems at the University of Waterloo, Dr. Chen is an expert in health data quality and analytics, specifically modernizing data gathering and rules around consent and sharing for research purposes.
Michelle is a TV personality, producer and writer with more than a decade of experience in broadcast and online media covering lifestyle, weather and news content.
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