How cancer informatics at University Hospitals is is helping save lives

Monica Robins reports on how informatics at University Hospitals is helping to save lives...

John Shanahan lived the tech life in New York City.

"I was a very typical nerdy technology guy," he says. "I started my career in telecommunications, and my big interest was actually looking at the the electromagnetic fields and signals within telecommunications and understanding how we could find better ways to to compress these things or better ways to secure them."

He never saw himself in health care until his 7-year-old niece developed a rare type of brain cancer.

"It's a cancer that is typically found in older women around their soft organ tissue, so it was the wrong kind of cancer in the wrong kind of person," John remembered. "And that was the first time I started to think about what's more important, where the cancer is or what the cancer is and how do we treat it."

While Shanahan's niece survived the cancer, his family had no history of the disease, so the diagnosis was a shock. Then, another shock, when John's father was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma. By the time, it was discovered, it was too late.

The loss of his father sent John's career into a new direction: He moved to Cleveland and became the director of cancer informatics at University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center.

"My field is clinical insight — 'How do we understand a disease better? How do we understand a patient experience? How do we understand all the factors that come into to managing somebody's health?'" he explained.

Shanahan spends his days talking to patients, listening to their concerns and complaints as well as talking to staff of all levels. Then, he collates data from every facet of cancer treatment, and that information has been helping to transform health care.

"Through the almost 10 years that I've been here, we've been able to work with really smart people and evolve the way that we approach the treatments of these diseases," he said. "It's shifting the way that that we're caring for patients, and more importantly, it's shifting the outcomes."

Because of his father's diagnosis, John has been more aware of checking his skin.

"It was one of the reasons I wanted to come here," he told us. "We have a very strong melanoma skin cancer group here, and the research they're doing here is pretty advanced, and I'm very thankful for it."

Because this past spring, he discovered a strange spot on his ear. His doctor wanted to wait, but John advocated for himself and insisted the appointment be moved up.

It was a move that made a huge difference: He was diagnosed with Stage 1 melanoma, but he never thought his years of work would impact him directly.