AcademyHealth’s Scaling Cancer Biomarker Testing Coalition, an initiative focused on making biomarker testing a covered, regular, and routine part of the cancer care diagnosis and treatment journey in the United States, has released its Compendium of Cancer Biomarker Initiatives. The Compendium is updated regularly and is designed to help the field easily access key initiatives and maintain ongoing awareness of what is happening in the cancer biomarker testing space.
Biomarker testing helps ensure that patients receive treatment matched to their test results and avoid treatment unlikely to benefit them. Although biomarker testing has been recommended in clinical guidelines for more than a decade, fewer than half of eligible patients receive it. The gap is not one of knowledge but of translating guidelines into routine practice. Many organizations are working to address the barriers that make consistent testing difficult, and their efforts have built an important foundation. Yet testing rates remain low and uneven, in part because these efforts often proceed in parallel. Closing the gap requires coordination across the cancer care ecosystem and a collective impact approach to the persistent, interconnected challenges that lead to inconsistent testing. The Compendium provides a foundation for that coordinated work.
Why a Central Resource Matters
The Scaling Cancer Biomarker Testing Coalition brings together organizations across the healthcare landscape to address key barriers that make routine biomarker testing hard to carry out in everyday practice. To address these challenges in a way that harmonizes existing efforts and amplifies impact, stakeholders need to understand what work is currently happening in the field, who is involved, and where there are gaps and opportunities for alignment. This information also needs to be accessible, so that everyone can easily access the same information at the same time.
Reducing the need to broadly search across websites and domains, the Compendium organizes resources in one place, allowing users to filter across several criteria to support easy and efficient identification of initiatives. The Compendium houses initiatives spanning a range of objectives such as:
- Policy work
- Guidelines and standards
- Workforce education and development
- Patient education and awareness
- Quality improvement
- Data
- Clinical workflows
Beyond centralizing work happening across the cancer biomarker testing landscape and improving access to this information, the Compendium gives organizations across sectors a place to share their work with the field. Users can also discover initiatives they may not have been aware of and find potential partners to connect with to continue their current efforts. The Compendium advances the coalition’s work by helping stakeholders share information, form partnerships, and coordinate their efforts so that the field's collective work has greater impact. The Compendium also grounds the coalition's own work. As coalition workstreams take shape, they will use it to identify existing efforts to build on, avoid duplication, and identify gaps in current work to aid in prioritizing areas where coalition activities can make the most impactful contributions to the landscape.
“An important and often overlooked step in cancer care improvement is making visible the work happening across the field…the Compendium [of Cancer Biomarker Initiatives] is a vital resource for understanding the spectrum of activities geared toward optimal use of biomarkers as a critical part of cancer diagnosis and treatment. [It] will help ensure coordination and reduce duplicative work and illustrates that biomarker optimization is a big issue that many in the cancer ecosystem are tackling. Kudos to AcademyHealth for compiling this rich and integral resource.” – Sarah Greene, MPH, Consultant and Scaling Cancer Biomarker Testing Coalition Steering Committee Member
Collecting the Information
Coalition staff looked across several sources (e.g., websites, research articles) to identify ongoing and recently completed initiatives that are relevant to the coalition’s goal of making biomarker testing a regular and expected part of cancer diagnosis and treatment. Initiatives were included if they are ongoing or recently completed, focus on improving access to, knowledge of, or uptake of cancer biomarker testing, and have publicly available information describing their activities. Inclusion in the Compendium does not constitute endorsement by AcademyHealth or the coalition. Key stakeholders and coalition members also shared initiatives for inclusion. The result is a growing list of more than 60 initiatives spanning a range of organizations and focus areas—from patient education to insurance coverage—creating a rich picture of the work currently underway in the cancer biomarker testing space. Coalition staff routinely monitor and maintain the Compendium, periodically updating it with new resources as relevant.
How to Use the Compendium
The Compendium can be accessed here. On the main page, initiatives are listed with high-level information that provides users an “at a glance” view, allowing users to easily scroll through the initiatives. Visitors to the site can also use the filter options to organize by:
- Organization
- Cancer Type
- Initiative Objective
- Geographic Scope
- Initiative Status
For additional information about the initiatives, users can click each initiative tile to view a brief description, key activities, and a link to the initiative’s website.
Coalition staff encourage users to submit recommendations via this form for additional initiatives that should be featured in the Compendium. Coalition staff review each submission against the Compendium's inclusion criteria and add initiatives that meet them.
To learn more about the Compendium, or the coalition itself, visit the coalition’s webpage or contact [email protected].