University of Rochester Medicine Wilmot Cancer Institute and UCHealth/University of Colorado Anschutz Cancer Center, both NCI-designated cancer centers, have joined ConcertAI’s CancerLinQ network, expanding the platform’s real-world oncology data reach and adding institutional weight to its mission of turning clinical practice data into quality improvement intelligence.
HotSpot Take
ConcertAI has added two NCI-designated cancer centers to its CancerLinQ network: University of Rochester Medicine Wilmot Cancer Institute and UCHealth/University of Colorado Anschutz Cancer Center. Both institutions are using the platform to automate quality data collection, generate real-time performance benchmarks, and, in the case of Anschutz, access the CancerLinQ Discovery research dataset for published research. The expansion widens a network that ConcertAI says now spans more than 900 sites of care across all 50 states.
Automating Quality Data Collection in Rochester
The University of Rochester Medicine Wilmot Cancer Institute is an NCI-designated cancer center with a multidisciplinary clinical research program. Its primary focus with CancerLinQ centers on automating data collection for the ASCO Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI), a certification program that requires systematic gathering and analysis of quality metrics.
“CancerLinQ can help us identify opportunities to improve patient care and workflows faster, rather than waiting weeks or months for the data that can help drive improvements.” — Arpan Patel, MD, MBA, Chief Quality Officer, Wilmot Cancer Institute
“Wilmot Cancer Institute is proud to have earned many certifications, including the ASCO Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI) certification, which requires gathering and analyzing data,” said Arpan Patel, MD, MBA, chief quality officer at Wilmot Cancer Institute. “CancerLinQ has provided an opportunity to automate this data collection process in a HIPAA-compliant, de-identified manner. This enables our providers to review real-time data related to their patients and compare their own care metrics with providers at our institution and other cancer centers across the country. CancerLinQ can help us identify opportunities to improve patient care and workflows faster, rather than waiting weeks or months for the data that can help drive improvements.”
That last point reflects a persistent challenge in oncology quality programs: the lag between when care is delivered and when performance data is available for review. According to ConcertAI, the CancerLinQ platform ingests data from network sites on a weekly basis, compressing a cycle that has historically taken months.
A Dual Focus in Colorado: Quality and Research
As Colorado’s only NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, the University of Colorado Anschutz Cancer Center operates in clinical partnership with UCHealth and is among the most research-active oncology programs in the Rocky Mountain region. The center joined the CancerLinQ network with two priorities: strengthening its QOPI Certification program and accessing CancerLinQ Discovery, the platform’s curated research dataset.
The company states that the CancerLinQ Discovery dataset spans more than 11 million patients and has already supported published research by the Anschutz team.
“This collaboration allows our teams to learn from real-world data at scale. That combination of actionable quality intelligence and research insight is critical to continuously improving how we deliver cancer care.” — Wells Messersmith, MD, University of Colorado Anschutz Cancer Center / UCHealth
“CancerLinQ gives us the ability to see our performance across providers and disease types, in a way that wasn’t possible when we were doing manual chart reviews with small patient subsets,” said Wells Messersmith, MD, associate director for clinical services at the University of Colorado Anschutz Cancer Center and head of the Division of Medical Oncology at the CU Department of Medicine and chief medical officer of oncology services at UCHealth. “This collaboration allows our teams to learn from real-world data at scale. That combination of actionable quality intelligence and research insight is critical to continuously improving how we deliver cancer care.”
The research application of CancerLinQ Discovery highlights an aspect of the platform that extends beyond internal quality programs into the broader scientific community. For academic medical centers under pressure to maintain research output alongside clinical performance, access to a large, de-identified real-world dataset represents practical infrastructure.
What CancerLinQ Does and How It Works
Real-world clinical data is reshaping how cancer centers measure and improve care quality.
CancerLinQ is a learning intelligence platform built around longitudinal oncology data. According to the company, the network now covers more than 900 sites of care across all 50 states, with data updated weekly. The platform uses AI to standardize and harmonize clinical data from electronic health records, including unstructured data that legacy systems would not capture, connecting clinical findings with patient activity levels and other contextual factors.
The goal, as ConcertAI describes it, is to give oncology teams access to the right information at the right time: quality metrics, national benchmarks, and clinical trial enrollment opportunities derived from actual patient care rather than from retrospective chart reviews or structured data alone.
“As oncology care becomes increasingly complex, organizations need stronger ways to translate data into continuous learning and consistent improvements in practice,” said Shaalan Beg, M.D., Chief Medical Officer, Oncology, at ConcertAI. “By expanding the CancerLinQ network with leading institutions at the forefront of data-driven oncology, such as Wilmot Cancer Institute and UCHealth/University of Colorado Anschutz Cancer Center, we are helping strengthen clinical performance and accelerate data-driven quality improvement across cancer care.”
Network Growth Since the ASCO Acquisition
ConcertAI acquired CancerLinQ from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in 2023. Since then, the company has continued expanding the platform’s capabilities and network reach. The addition of Wilmot and Anschutz brings two flagship NCI-designated programs into the network, institutions whose participation tends to carry weight with other academic medical centers evaluating similar platforms.
For oncology programs weighing how to meet growing quality reporting demands without adding manual abstraction burden to already stretched clinical teams, CancerLinQ’s pitch is efficiency: automated data pipelines, real-time metrics, and benchmarking against a national peer group. How that value proposition scales across smaller community oncology practices, which represent a significant share of cancer care delivery in the U.S., remains a relevant question as the network continues to grow.
The clinical stakes are not abstract. The National Cancer Institute reports that approximately 2 million new cancer diagnoses are made in the United States each year. For those patients, the consistency and quality of care they receive, regardless of where they are treated, depends in part on whether oncology teams have the data infrastructure to identify gaps and close them.
Oncology platforms using AI to manage between-visit patient communication represent another evolving layer of that infrastructure, as AI-driven virtual care tools extend their reach further into the cancer care continuum.
— This original article was created with AI support.
