4 areas of current oncology clinical practice have serious, unmet health information technology needs, according to a recently published update. The areas—identified during the ASCO Data Standards and Interoperability Summit—include: 1) omics and precision oncology; 2) advancing interoperability; 3) patient engagement; and 4) value-based oncology.

Among the recommendations made after the Summit:

• Identify appropriate and specific genomic standards to provide flexible and adaptable data exchange between genomic laboratories, external genomic knowledge bases, and the EHR.
• Create a specification for development of a modular app that will help connect practicing oncologists with up-to-date genomic-guided information and treatment of patients.
• Develop a meta-knowledge base that provides all possible coding for any gene-genomic abnormality combination.
• Develop a mapping application that taps into the knowledge base, accepts any gene-genomic abnormality combination, and identifies all alternative nomenclatures for that combination.