Our Director of Activations and Data Transformation, Andrew McElfresh, is a proud double-Hoo, having graduated twice from the University of Virginia. Wahoowa! His first job out of undergrad was before the dot com bubble burst, and their mission was to disrupt the catered food business. Think GrubHub or DoorDash for the busy office admin who had to order lunch, but before the internet was your go-to for everything. They aimed to simplify the lives of those admin, and their differentiator was service - taking care of all ordering 
logistics, the nasty back-end reporting needs, and the peculiar desires of their particular executives. Andrew and his colleagues all expected to retire on their private islands, but then the bubble burst...
He moved on from e-commerce to scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publishing. As a product manager, he led cross-functional platform teams responsible for user data migrations, access controls, search features, and e-commerce solutions. Their goal was similar – disrupt the market. And they succeeded. Their recipe for success was great team culture, smarts, grit, curiosity, and willingness to try new things, make mistakes, and LEARN from them – Andrew readily admits he’s made his fair share!
Andrew began his journey at CancerLinQ in 2017 and sees the same qualities in our team as in his STM team. He is more optimistic than ever about CancerLinQ’s future and our ability to improve the outcomes for patients with cancer and advance clinical research.
What does your role involve at CancerLinQ?
Solving problems. Does that answer suffice? 😊
Day to day, I support our Activation/Informatics Team. Our team is responsible for successfully onboarding new practices to the CancerLinQ platform, which involves integrations with primary EHRs and supplementary data sources, data harmonization, support of our active practices, and, of course, solving whatever problem comes our way. We also support our internal teams by making sense of the tangle that is real-world oncology data.
How do you support the CancerLinQ mission?
The Activation Informatics team supports the CancerLinQ mission with a relentless commitment to our practices and their data. We advance quality internally with codifications and externally by helping our practice teams better capture data in the EHR. Together, we continually improve our ability to gain insights from the patient journeys.
In your opinion, what is CancerLinQ’s biggest opportunity for impact?
CancerLinQ has fantastic potential beyond the existing capabilities on our platform and future data-driven products and services. In the short term, I see tremendous opportunities for the practices in our network to learn from each other. The practice community is dedicated to the quality of care, and I'd like to see more engagement to share best practices from one practice to another.
What do you do for fun when not working?
Pretty much anything likely to get me dirty. I have a passion for cars, gardening, cooking, and tinkering. I'm all in if there is a need for a power tool. Oh, and traveling is fun too.
