ALEXANDRIA, Va. — ASCO’s CancerLinQ^® today launched the SmartLinQ^™ QOPI^® Certification Pathway, an application that empowers oncology practices to automate quality measure tracking and reporting for participation in ASCO’s Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI) Certification Program, a three-year certification recognizing practices’ commitment to high-quality care for outpatient oncology practices.

Since 2019, SmartLinQ has enabled CancerLinQ practices to automate their quality activities, derive actionable insights from real-world patient data, and benchmark their care against the CancerLinQ network. The new SmartLinQ QOPI Certification Pathway was recently piloted at four of CancerLinQ’s more than 100 subscribing practices, enabling them to reduce staff time and expenses for quality reporting for QOPI Certification. It is now available for re-certification and maintenance submissions for all QOPI Certified CancerLinQ subscribers.

“As oncology practices work to maximize their quality of care, they also face fast-rising costs and administrative burdens on staff,” said CancerLinQ CEO Cory Wiegert. “SmartLinQ is already helping practices reclaim valuable time and resources that can be better devoted to their patients.”

SmartLinQ’s benefits stem from the automation of quality management functions, beginning with data collection. CancerLinQ automatically and securely takes in and harmonizes and codifies the data from practices’ electronic health records (EHR) systems, eliminating the need for manual chart abstraction for quality programs like QOPI Certification. New Mexico Cancer Center, one of the SmartLinQ QOPI Certification Pathway pilot practices, saved approximately 100 hours of staff time when using SmartLinQ to automate its recertification for the QOPI Certification Program.

“We were delighted when CancerLinQ evolved to the point where they were able to electronically abstract data,” said Barbara McAneny, MD, CEO of New Mexico Cancer Center. “That is a major hurdle that has been overcome.”

Beyond data abstraction and automated quality reporting for QOPI Certification, SmartLinQ enables practices to:

• Track progress daily against a broad set of quality measures, both for the practice overall and for specific sites and individual physicians
• Benchmark care against peers, by querying de-identified patient data on 1.5 million real-world cancer patient records in the CancerLinQ database
• Identify “actionable patients” who still need specific care or treatment to comply with quality standards, creating opportunities to proactively improve care
• Identify and fix data quality issues, such as missing or inaccurate data in patients’ EHRs

“Oncology practices deserve to be recognized for delivering high-quality care, and they shouldn’t have to sacrifice time with patients to achieve that recognition,” said CancerLinQ Medical Director Robert S. Miller MD, FACP, FASCO. “With SmartLinQ, everyone benefits. Practices can seek quality certification while focusing more of their energies on patient care. Most importantly, patients gain from that attention and from improvements in the quality of care.”

“With electronic reporting, things are seamless,” said Luis A. Rojas, Clinical Vice President of Cancer Services at Avera Cancer Institute, a SmartLinQ pilot practice in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “It’s actually gratifying to the physicians when we see our numbers.”

CancerLinQ^® and SmartLinQ^™ are products of CancerLinQ LLC. The QOPI® Certification Program is a program of QOPI Certification Program, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of American Society of Clinical Oncology, Inc. For more information on how to participate or to schedule a demo, please visit CancerLinQ.org or email info@cancerlinq.org.

About CancerLinQ LLC:
CancerLinQ® and CancerLinQ Discovery® are projects of CancerLinQ LLC. CancerLinQ LLC is a wholly owned nonprofit subsidiary of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) established for the development and operation of the CancerLinQ® initiative. CancerLinQ collects and analyzes real-world cancer care data from multiple healthcare IT systems in order improve the quality of care and health care operations. CancerLinQ Discovery® provides data and analytics to the oncology community that can generate practical knowledge to shape the future of cancer care. To learn more, visit www.cancerlinq.org.