COMPASS: Clinical Oncology Milestones – Patient Journey Automation and Synthesis System
Winner of the PHB Translational Award 2025
The PHB Translational Award 2025 supported part of the position of Dr. Benjamin Thiele, Consultant in Medical Oncology at University Hospital Basel, over a 12-month period starting June 1, 2025, enabling him to dedicate time away from clinical duties to focus on this innovative project:
🧭 COMPASS: Clinical Oncology Milestones – Patient Journey Automation and Synthesis System
Modern oncology care involves complex, multidisciplinary pathways that generate extensive clinical, molecular, and patient-reported data across various digital platforms. While this data offers great potential, its fragmentation often results in administrative burdens and difficulties in maintaining cohesive and accessible patient records. Building on promising preliminary work at USB, which demonstrated the technical feasibility of integrating diverse data sources, including the clinical data warehouse and molecular diagnostics platforms, Dr. Thiele’s project developed an automated system that models individual patient journeys.
COMPASS is a concrete implementation of personalized health principles at the University Hospital Basel (USB), fusing multi-modal clinical data to support individualized oncology care at a leading Swiss academic centre. It establishes a technical and clinical foundation for data-driven, patient-centred decision-making, directly advancing PHB’s mission to translate digital infrastructure investments into measurable improvements in patient care. It enables, for the first time, a comprehensive and integrated overview of oncology patients treated at USB, fusing all available patient related information into a single structured display. Clinicians can rapidly comprehend both the clinical and disease trajectory of individual patients, substantially reducing preparation time prior to consultations and tumor board discussions. Information previously distributed across multiple disconnected systems is now immediately and simultaneously accessible.
COMPASS has reached TRL 6–7: a functional prototype is operational and has been demonstrated with real patient cases across multiple tumor entities. COMPASS will be embedded within the dashboard application at USB parallel with a rollout study to quantify workflow improvement, user trust calibration, and clinical impact.
📣 If you are interested in taking part in the rollout or would like to know more, please contact Benjamin Thiele and Ismael Embaby.
This project was made possible through the PHB Translational Award, which provided two critical enablers: dedicated protected time for Benjamin Thiele to lead translation from validated concept to deployable prototype, and the IT expertise and support necessary to realize this work. Such a trajectory is hardly achievable within standard clinical research funding frameworks.
Congratulation Dr. Benjamin Thiele from the Oncology Department at USB, and Ismael Embaby and Victor Parmar, from the D&ICT at USB, for the great collaborative work and achievement! 👏
Have a look at the Demo Video below!
