xCures was started in 2018 to help Cancer Commons, a patient advocacy organization, retrieve and aggregate medical records from any US care site for their patients. The result was the creation of an AI-assisted platform that automatically gathers, extracts and structures data from medical records within 15 minutes. This offers patients and their physicians a comprehensive view of a patient’s health journey, including test results, scan images, treatments, and doctor visits. The xINFORM portal for patients and xDECIDE for providers help improve care and treatment decisions.

xDECIDE is a clinical decision support tool for oncologists and their staff.  Interactive online portals allow them to view a patient’s simplified graphical summary of their cancer history (Care Summary) and a list of personalized treatment options sourced from national expert oncologists, insights from virtual tumor boards, public data sources, and an active learning network (Treatment Options Report).

A Care Summary consists of two parts: 

1. All the patient’s medical records in raw format.
2. An overview of all the aspects of their care journey that are most relevant to future treatment considerations: info about their disease, what they’ve done to combat it, and how that’s gone to date.

The Treatment Options Report is a rank-ordered set of treatments for your consideration. It includes supporting medical rationales and information regarding therapy access. Option selection considers expert recommendations, insights from virtual tumor boards, public data sources, and an active learning network.

We will not charge you or your patients for a Care Summary or a Treatment Options Report. Participation is granted through (de-identified) data. Sharing experiences with similar patients in the platform allows for collective learning from each other in real-time.

You can find an example of an xCures Treatment Options Report here.

Our AI Tools match patients with a personalized list of treatment options in 3 steps:

1. Understanding the patient– xCures uses the Care Summary to scan for distinctive traits to guide personalized treatments. These include tumor type, additional diagnostic information, treatment history, other medical conditions, and more.

2. Identify matching treatments – Our AI Tools sift through multiple sources of treatment data to match a patient’s key traits from their medical records with the most promising treatment options.

Sources of data include:

• Published research on which treatments work for similar patients, such as clinical trial results and case studies
• Databases of treatments that match the patient’s distinctive genetic testing results
• Outcomes from other patients on the xINFORM platform
• Recommendations from doctors at leading academic medical institutions
• Other scientific and medical databases

3. Rank the best options – We rank the matching treatments by our best estimate of how well each could work for the patient. Our algorithms calculate these estimates based on matching with the information above, how often the treatment was recommended by experts to patients with similar traits, and also using data on similar patients who tried those treatments—either from our own platform or from published research.

These outputs receive a final review by xCures’ PhD scientists, who collaborate with expert oncologists and leaders in the field in various tumor types, to provide you and your patient with a ranked options list with the medical and scientific reasoning behind each treatment.

The security of your data is of paramount importance to xCures. It begins when you sign an Authorization for the Release of Medical Information in accordance with the HIPAA patient right of access, allowing xCures to request information from your treating institutions(compliant with 45 CFR 164.524). Data is sent securely from the treating institutions to xCures, where, per XCELSIOR Study Informed Consent you have also completed, it is able to be stored in an Electronic Data Capture (EDC) system, compliant with 21 CFR Part 11. EDCs that are Part 11 compliant meet the FDA’s criteria for security and accuracy for tasks, such as clinical trials and regulatory submissions. 

Access to personally-identifiable health information (PHI) is restricted to you, the health care providers you have identified, and only those xCures employees who need access for their jobs (all such employees take training in handling PHI). Some xCures employees, such as software developers, who need access to the format of the data to but not the content, can access a version of data in which all PHI has been removed and replaced with tokens, so as to protect your privacy. 

All data at rest within the system (e.g., in files, in databases is encrypted. All data in motion (e.g., being viewed in a web browser, or sent via email) is likewise encrypted in transit. This is done to protect privacy at all times. We use various technologies to hinder and prevent e attacks on our web portals and data infrastructure by malicious actors. In addition, we provide security training to all xCures employees regarding best security practices and the handling of PHI, and we monitor our infrastructure for signs of intrusion or hacking attempts.