Podcast HealthRewired: where data and treatment come together

“What we ultimately want is to be able to provide every cancer patient with a personalized treatment recommendation.”
 Prof. Dr. Miriam Koopman, medical oncologist, UMC Utrecht

Personalized treatment

How can we make cancer care more personalized and more effective? This ambition led to the launch of HealthRewired, a project in which healthcare professionals in the middle region of the Netherlands are working together to make better use of patient data.

In a new podcast series listeners go behind the scenes of this initiative to learn how the use of these data can support better treatment decisions.

In this first episode, medical oncologist Prof, dr. Miriam Koopman, chair of the regional oncology network Oncomid and one of the driving forces behind the project, speaks with Inge Diepman. She shares her enthusiasm for the importance and origins of HealthRewired. The initiative involves not only physicians, but also board members, IT specialists, and other healthcare professionals who help create the data and care infrastructure needed to make this possible.

According to Miriam, cancer care already generates a great deal of data, but we are still far from using it to its full potential for learning and improvement.
‘ What we are trying to do with HealthRewired is learn from all available patient data, so that we can ultimately make better predictions about which treatment works best for which patient.’ 

A more complete picture

The project initially focuses on patients with metastatic colorectal cancer and lung cancer. By collecting data from everyday clinical practice, so-called real-world data, and linking these to genetic information about the tumor, HealthRewired aims to build an increasingly complete picture of what treatment works, and for whom.

HealthRewired is a collaboration between Oncomid, Hartwig Medical Foundation, and IKNL. Together, they connect different data sources: IKNL provides clinical patient data, while Hartwig Medical Foundation adds information from tumor DNA analyses.

Start of a serie

This first podcast marks the start of a series. In the upcoming episodes, other healthcare professionals involved in the project will also share their perspectives and explore in greater depth how HealthRewired is being implemented in practice, from data collection to the actual use of insights in the consultation room.

Listen to the first episode and follow the series to see how HealthRewired is taking shape step by step.