Philosophy
HemOnc.org Core Philosophy
The practice of hematology/oncology involves extensive knowledge about numerous drugs and complex treatment regimens. This information is constantly evolving, and when we conducted a needs assessment in 2011, there was no freely available, comprehensive, centralized repository of such information. HemOnc.org was created to address this unmet need.
HemOnc.org has grown organically since its founding in 2011. In 2017, the website had reached a level of maturity where formal incorporation of HemOnc.org LLC, as the content owner of HemOnc.org, was undertaken. Along with this incorporation, five guiding principles were identified and are listed here:
- Complete and continuously updated, including historical information for educational purposes. (although we won't have everything all the time, we will keep adding to work towards being as complete as possible)
- Accurate information for clinical use, always with primary sources cited
- Standardized means of describing regimens to clearly communicate information and minimize errors
- Free and open to all users, regardless of nationality, with links to free resources (e.g., PubMed Central) whenever possible
- User-first organization and design. Oncology professionals made the reference we wanted. Most useful content is linked regardless of affiliation.
HemOnc.org Overarching Goals
The goals of the HemOnc.org project are displayed on the main landing page and are replicated here:
- Creating a database of all approved systemic anticancer therapy agents and supportive medications used in the field of hematology/oncology.
- Creating a database of all standard-of-care systemic anticancer therapy regimens and references to primary literature (PubMed and direct links to the abstracts articles).
- Sample order sets and examples of supportive medications used with treatment regimens
- Aggregating useful links to existing resources by disease, such as guidelines, information about prognosis, clinical calculators, staging, and patient resources.
- Creating, maintaining, and disseminating a formalized ontology of anticancer drugs and regimens.
Note that while these goals may evolve over time, they have been relatively static since the founding of the website in 2011.