Colorectal cancer is now the primary cause of cancer-related deaths among young men under age 50 and the second leading cause of cancer-related death among women under age 50. At current rates, it will be the leading cancer killer for all people age 20 to 49 by 2030. This trend toward younger disease prevalence and increased mortality is underpinned by the confounding reality that 90% of these deaths are preventable.
Closing the frustrating gap between the real-world experience of colorectal cancer patients and the constantly improving science of early detection and intervention is part of the core mission of Fight Colorectal Cancer (Fight CRC), the leading patient empowerment and advocacy organization in the U.S. To help in that fight, they’ve recently assembled a diverse group of partners to create the Colorectal Cancer Care Initiative (CRCCI), a coalition that leverages complementary expertise and resources to confront colorectal cancer’s pressing challenges. The group’s first output, the breakthrough 2024 Colorectal Cancer Care Report published in November, is a rallying cry that brings together the latest research, real-world data, and critical benchmarks to help inspire action and inform policy and public health initiatives around treatment and prevention.
Komodo Health has partnered with Fight CRC for several years to help spotlight critical gaps in care and inform patient advocacy efforts, and we’re proud to have played a key role in the new Colorectal Cancer Care Report. During her time as Komodo’s Chief Data Officer, Meghan M. Dierks, MD, FACS, appeared at the 2024 STAT Summit in a panel discussion with Fight CRC President Anjee Davis, MPPA, and Fola May, MD, PhD and associate professor of medicine at UCLA Health, to discuss the new report and some of our key findings.
Sharing some of the core insights from Komodo’s real-world data-driven research in the report, Dierks explained that screening for colorectal cancer is just part of the challenge. The real issue is compressing the window of time between an initial abnormal reading and an intervention.
“Colorectal cancer is now becoming a disease of young people, and those young people do not really fit into our current framework and training when it comes to diagnosis and intervention,” Dierks explained. ‘We haven’t done justice for patients if all we’re trying to optimize for is the first screening. When you look at the data – particularly among a younger cohort of patients – you see that there is typically a long period between an abnormal result from a noninvasive screening and a definitive diagnosis with a colonoscopy and eventual treatment.”
Dierks explained that, in the real world, people have other competing demands; in some cases, they may have comorbidities that are preventing them from getting care in a timely fashion. She stressed the importance of being able to understand all of the interdependencies that go into the patient experience before effective intervention is possible.
“We don’t think these are biologic differences; they are mutable factors that we can impact in the work we do in healthcare delivery and sciences,” UCLA’s May added. “We know, for example, that patients experience wide variations in outcomes based on where they live, what types of insurance they have, and what color their skin is. It’s a combination of factors across the continuum of care that creates these large disparities, and it’s important to measure those differences.”
Some of the previous research Komodo has conducted with Fight CRC shine a spotlight on those disparities in terms of both socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic barriers to care and discrepancies in treatment across diverse patient populations.
“The reason it’s so important to measure these things and track individual patient experiences at scale is because we can now be really specific with treatment,” Dierks added. “Once a patient is diagnosed, they now have access to biomarkers that can inform very specific precision therapies that exist today. If you can’t get past the first steps, you can’t get to those amazing innovations that are making it possible to improve outcomes.”
Fight CRC’s Davis had the final word in the panel discussion, laying out her organization’s call-to-action to close the average window between noninvasive test screening and follow-up colonoscopy to under 90 days. “There are 1.6 million colorectal cancer survivors who are counting on us,” she said. “The report is a first step. It helps inform and align on goals. But we really need our partners to come to the table, raise their hands, and say, ‘I’m committed to this goal.’ The only way we’re going to see progress is if people come to the table and help lead the effort to increase the quality of care in this country.”
In her new chapter as Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Dierks will have these critical conversations on a national stage and lead the way forward in harnessing real-world data for effective, responsible, and patient-centered AI.
Check out Komodo and Fight CRC’s past collaborations on diagnosis, care, and outcomes.
