Medical oncologist Mia Levy, MD, PhD, is a statistical anomaly. As director of Cancer Clinical Informatics for the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Levy brings a unique skill set to an indisputably complex field of medicine.
Math & Medicine
“I was interested in medical school from a young age and then got interested in information technology,” Levy explained. She received her undergraduate degree in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania and her Medical Doctorate from Illinois’ Rush University. She applied to medical school while working for an Internet start-up in the late ‘90s but still wanted to study informatics.
“I wanted to make sure I understood real world problems – to have the expertise of a practicing clinician and also someone with programming experience,” she said.
Levy spent the next six years at Stanford University completing post-graduate training in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology while simultaneously pursuing her PhD in Biomedical Informatics.
In 2009, she joined Vanderbilt as assistant professor in Biomedical Informatics and Medicine. Today the mother of two wears multiple hats and can be found treating patients as a Breast Center oncologist, serving as director of Cancer Health Informatics and Strategy, and managing data analytic needs from the research and clinical operations perspective.
She’s also building her own research portfolio in the area of precision medicine and cancer delivery. Precision medicine describes how genetic information about a person’s disease is being used to diagnose or treat their disease. Because cancer is a disease of the genome, researchers have found each tumor has its own set of genetic changes. Understanding the genetic changes in cancer cells is leading to more effective treatment strategies that are tailored to the genetic profile of each patient’s cancer.
Precision Medicine
According to Levy, precision cancer medicine programs represent the greatest IT-related breakthroughs in oncology. “We’re integrating next generation sequencing techniques and analyzing genetics of tumors themselves, which is driving patient care decisions,” Levy said.
But monstrous data sets with variable levels of clinical utility can be confusing, and clinicians need support from medical bioinformatics experts like Levy. “Precision medicine still isn’t the standard of care for every cancer type, but it is for many including those with advanced diseases,” she said. The treatment is migrating into an early curative setting, as well.
Learning Healthcare Systems
A second industry breakthrough is the concept of “learning healthcare systems” or “learning cancer systems” – described by Levy as “liberating data locked away inside electronic health records and leveraging it for discovery, operational efficiency and quality care delivery.”
A seemingly common disease, cancer actually consists of over 200 different diagnoses. “There is also appropriate variability in the way each patient is treated, and thus each institution only treats a small percentage of patients that fit a given profile in any given year,” Levy said. “We need to be able to share data across institutions. This requires huge cultural changes, as well as large scale adoption of electronic health records across the country.”
Still in its infancy, the learning healthcare system is at a junction where experts are now looking for ways to share data currently being collected as part of routine patient care. The next step, Levy said, will be to find ways to leverage that data to support real time clinical and operational decision-making.
“In order to leverage the promise of big data, the medical community must evolve into a data fluent culture,” Levy explained. “It’s not enough to have data and put it in a place together and do some discovery on it. We must learn to leverage the data to inform our practice of medicine. Near real-time data analytics gives us the opportunity to evaluate how changes in our healthcare delivery model impact the patient experience and patient outcomes. That’s the real promise of learning healthcare systems. Big data is only a part of it.”
Levy said Vanderbilt is one of a few institutions that understood the value of these opportunities a decade ago and now makes it available to operations and research professionals. “We’re building a culture of data fluency and growing it here,” she said. “It’s an honor to be in a program like that with colleagues exercising the concept of data fluency and discovery, and we’re just at the tip of it.”
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