– UChicago Medicine working with Mammosphere by Life Image to allow patients easy, secure access to their breast imaging and to support the WISDOM Study to establish screening guidelines.
– Mammosphere was developed to support women throughout their entire breast health journey, including contributing to scientific research. By offering patients this digital tool, patients in the WISDOM Study will have additional tools to support their long-term commitment to the research.
Life Image, the world’s largest medical imaging network, announced that it will provide Mammosphere, a breast health data access tool, to the University of Chicago Medicine to support recruitment for a pioneering research effort. This leading academic medical center, which performed more than 14,000 outpatient mammography exams in 2018, serves a unique and diverse patient base across the Chicagoland area. It is the first Midwest expansion partner site for the WISDOM Study, a large-scale clinical trial aimed at developing optimal guidelines for breast cancer screening.
Why It Matters
Patients face enormous (and illegal) pushback when requesting their data from provider systems, making it difficult for women to obtain prior breast health records, which are essential for accurate and efficient cancer detection. Mammosphere solves this challenge by allowing women to easily and securely request, store, and share their breast health records. By putting women in control of their own records, Mammosphere is helping UChicago optimize the breast screening experience and conduct research to end the confusion around breast screening recommendations.
Life Image is also providing UChicago Medicine with the ability to streamline access to picture archiving communication systems (PACS) and electronic health record (EHR) systems in order to modernize processes for sharing information with patients. As WISDOM participation in the Chicago area increases, UChicago Medicine will be able to more effectively manage a high volume of requests from participants to receive and share breast health records without delay at its locations and affiliate sites. It also creates a longitudinal view of the individual patient’s breast history to track changes over time, providing the historical medical records that are integral to support the WISDOM Study.
WISDOM Study Background
WISDOM is a a five-year longitudinal study that compares two different approaches to breast cancer screening – personalized screening versus annual screening. The personalized screening approach will take multiple risk factors into consideration, including genetic markers, to determine the most effective screening frequency and modality for an individual. Over time, the WISDOM Study hopes to discover which risk factors are most important, allowing regulators and providers to improve our screening recommendations accordingly. The WISDOM Study aims to recruit 100,000 women in order to improve breast cancer screening guidelines.
“As a partner of the WISDOM Study, we are committed to supporting the research that will end the confusion for all women around screening guidelines based on patients’ unique risk factors,” said Deepa Sheth, MD, Assistant Professor of Radiology, UChicago Medicine. “In the era of precision medicine, we have the opportunity to find the correct breast health screening protocol for an individual based on their risk, and by engaging our diverse community we can be certain the data and results are ethnically universal and applicable to any and all women.”
