Design and Implementation of Fully Automated Multi-Campus Patient Plan Readiness System
S Elguindi*, M Zhu, D Wang, L Santanam, A Li, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY
Presentations
MO-C930-IePD-F4-2 (Monday, 7/11/2022) 9:30 AM - 10:00 AM [Eastern Time (GMT-4)]
Exhibit Hall | Forum 4
Purpose: Daily coordination and ensuring readiness of a large volume of radiotherapy treatment plans daily is resource intensive and prone to quality management failures, especially when current methods tend to rely on manual verification across multiple electronic systems. We implemented an automated system, eCoordinator, to monitor patient plan readiness and gather pertinent information for physics plan checks before their scheduled appointment in a centralized web-based dashboard to reduce workload and improve efficiency.
Methods: The scope and capability of programmatic access to our Institution’s Hospital Information System (HIS), Radiotherapy TMS, and contouring system was first identified. We then generate a ground truth patient new start list for the upcoming 3 business days, every 30 minutes. Data is aggregated into a data-rich web application, accessible to all users. Included were pertinent information from the ancillary systems like implanted devices, prescription details, treatment machine, consent document, and contoured image sets as a snapshot, preventing the need for users to access multiple systems independently for plan checks. Self-reported time studies were done to estimate the clinical impact.
Results: On average it takes 1.7 minutes to verify the readiness of a single patient plan and 3 minutes per chart check for finding ancillary system information. eCoordinator would require approximately 61.2 man-hours per day to perform the same task manually, assuming a rolling two-day average of 90 patient new starts across all our campuses and checking patient plan readiness every 30 minutes for a 12-hour treatment day.
Conclusion: We successfully implemented a fully automated patient plan readiness system at our institution. This system has the potential to not only eliminate hours of patient chart verification done daily but increase the frequency of this check for real-time status updates.
Keywords
Quality Assurance, Radiation Therapy, Treatment Planning
Taxonomy
TH- Dataset Analysis/Biomathematics: Informatics
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