Ben Miller, MD, University of Iowa assistant professor of orthopedics and rehabilitation, will direct an effort to establish a multi-institutional registry to track the outcomes of sarcoma patients after treatment.
Miller was awarded a $100,250 grant from the Orthopaedic Research and Education Foundation/Musculoskeletal Tumor Society that will fund the initial stage of the project. He will work with a team of orthopedic oncologists from across 12 institutions to develop the registry.
“Sarcoma is a rare cancer affecting a broad demographic spectrum of patients, and obtaining meaningful data has been historically difficult,” Miller says.
The aim is to create a body of data that is richer than current sarcoma registries hold, and one of the keys is to minimize the burden of data entry by automating data collection directly from electronic health records.
“We would like to create a robust, multi-function data-collection platform that records accurate oncological, functional, and quality-of-life outcome measures after surgical treatment of sarcoma,” he says.
Miller, who also co-leads the UI’s Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center Sarcoma Multidisciplinary Oncology Group, says the registry will benefit sarcoma research as well as clinical care for sarcoma patients.