MAY - 20208In My OpinionPenny Kechagioglou, Chief Medical Officer, GenesisCareByBIG DATA IN CANCER TREATMENTRandomised controlled data (RCTs) are considered the gold standard in cancer medicine when performing comparative research between different interventions to assess their effectiveness. RCTs are thought to be grossly free from bias and confounding; they account for unmeasured variables as they tend to have a robust design and provide mostly accurate patient-reported outcomes. However, poorly designed RCTs can have the opposite effect and mis-inform the medical community of the real benefit of an intervention. RCTs of poor quality can be very costly, lead to confusion in the oncology community, demotivate researchers, and can result in loss of trust to the intervention by clinicians. Real world data (RWD) and clinical registries (CRs) are increasing in popularity due to their ease of collection, inexpensive collection methods, and due to being readily available with every patient care record. If they are systematically collected across a range of different providers or a network of centres belonging to the same provider, RWD and CRs can provide a valuable repository of clinical information, including minimum cancer datasets, clinical characteristics, imaging and biochemical data, genomic data, which can be linked to cancer treatments provided, patient-reported outcomes and long-term clinical outcomes. Although Penny Kechagioglou
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