Health inequalities are pervasive throughout Europe, and this is no different when it comes to colorectal cancer (CRC). Studies on CRC epidemiology implicate a number of lifestyle-based risk factors of CRC risk or CRC-specific mortality such as smoking, alcohol consumption, diet, and being physically inactive. Most European governments have implemented a screening programme to detect CRC early in people aged 50-74 years. However, in some countries participation among the eligible population is less than 50%.
Where does my country stand on factors that increase or decrease the risk of CRC, or of dying from this disease? Which factors influence the probability that someone gets screened via a public screening programme? Are there any commonalities between these characteristics that are particularly relevant for public health? The ONCOSCREEN tool ONCO-EVIDA aims to shed some light on these questions with an intelligent dashboard developed to identify “hotspots” of CRC incidence, CRC-specific mortality, and/or low screening coverage. The tool is specifically tailored towards policymakers and focuses on differences and comparisons on subnational levels.
Policymakers are often not scientists themselves but still want to make decisions grounded on the best available evidence. We want to support them by implementing descriptive and predictive analytics into our tool. In the initial stage, ONCO-EVIDA end-users will be able to visualize regional discrepancies in screening, socio-economic factors, CRC outcomes and even environmental exposures (pictured above). The tool can calculate correlations between these variables and queries can be saved to the user’s own dashboard page. Data that are available across multiple years can be plotted in a time series and the tool can predict estimations for the next few years based on the available data.
In a later stage, the risk calculations will be more advanced, and we aim to enable comparisons between the status-quo and a hypothetical scenario of the end-user’s own making. For example, users would be able to compare the status quo of CRC incidence against what will happen to the if alcohol consumption decreases by 20% in that region or what will happen if we succeed in getting 10% more people screened. This information empowers policymakers to customize policy to those areas and subpopulations that would benefit the most from them. By focusing on regionally and locally aggregated data, ONCO-EVIDA strikes a balance between precision, privacy preservation and relevance for policy.
ONCO-EVIDA is very much a team effort. Within the wider ONCOSCREEN ecosystem, ONCO-EVIDA takes the role of a data acceptor and retrieves data from a Data Lake developed by the Centre for Research & Technology Hellas (CERTH) and thus indirectly integrates with multiple other ONCO-tools. CERTH also develops ONCO-EVIDA’s back end, while the front end is developed by Catalink Ltd, who also host the tool during the development phase. The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) provides environmental data and general support, and the Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO) coordinates the development of ONCO-EVIDA and reaches out to end-users (i.e. policymakers) for feedback.
This feedback is extremely valuable to us. For example, upon the policymakers’ suggestion, we have committed to providing a default overview of socio-economic inequalities and screening policy on ONCO-EVIDA’s homepage, depending on the country the end-user logs in from. We learn from them so that they can learn from our tools and implement the most suitable policies.