7 Years ago, I was responsible for delivering a BI solution in which we had to slice and dice the oncology clinical and financial data/information.
Very quickly I realized, if we model the regimen details differently , all the systems down stream (designing the regimen, delivering chemo therapy, cost estimation of a regimen, adherence etc.) could benefit tremendously.
We have built a powerful system to make this vision a reality. I will be blogging about the system in next few episodes.
REGIMEN DESIGNER
Everything a starts with a regimen (which tells how a given type of cancer has to be treated). A typical chemotherapy regimen is quite complicated. It has to take lot of things in to consideration.
We have seen some complex civil structures (bridges, multi-story buildings, roads etc.) being built. Civil engineers use tools such as AutoCAD to design and model this. Why don’t we provide a similar designer tool to oncologists? Theoretically it is possible to model a given regimen where a clinician can express the details of the regimen. This includes things such as numbers of cycles and length of each cycle, what agents are given on what day in a cycle, if the agents need supportive drugs (to increase the white blood cells, to stop patient from getting anemic etc.).
Well, we took that vision and built a cool designer (think of this a AutoCAD version for Oncologists). For example, the following screen shows a scenario where a clinician is designing a regimen (Happens to be ACT Version 4.0) and modeling the fact that this regimen could be used to treat set of breast cancers
MANAGE PATIENTS THROUGH ONCOLOGY SPECIFIC EMR
DELIVERING REGIMEN – CHEMOTHERAPY ADMINISTRATION
Chemotherapy administration is a very collaborative task. Lot of people have to co-ordinate to deliver chemo agents. Our solution shines in this aspect also.
So much could be done in the area of cancer research and treatment. We are doing our part. Innovations/Improvements will make us productive and reduce errors.
More detail in upcoming posts….
