Program Information
Post-Upgrade Quality Assurance of the Radiation Oncology Information System
S Chen*, b zhang , B Yi , K Langen , E Nichols , U Langner , A Gopal , C Kalavagunta , K Prado , W D'Souza , Univ. of Maryland School Of Medicine, Baltimore, MD
Presentations
TU-C2-GePD-TT-5 (Tuesday, August 1, 2017) 10:00 AM - 10:30 AM Room: Therapy ePoster Theater
Purpose: To clinically implement a Quality Assurance (QA) program for the Radiation Oncology Information System (ROIS) post upgrade.
Methods: The ROIS is a complicated system, serving as the record-and-verify system, electronic medical records system, and imaging management system for Radiation Oncology. An upgrade of the ROIS means database migration, database schema change, and software functionality change. Patients on treatments are of critical importance because the data has a direct impact on the safety of the treatment. A QA program was designed based on the chance of database corruption and its severity, and risk assessment of the patient data. It was validated with an ARIA major upgrade from version 11 to 13.
Results: The QA program includes four parts: 1) an in-house program to compare database to check its integrity; 2) an in-house program to compare the DICOM RT files (treatment parameters and records) before and after the upgrade for patients on treatment; 3) as a redundant check, patients on treatment are mode-up on a linear accelerator and are manually verified for treatment parameters and records; 4) an end-to-end testing on a phantom patient from patient registration to treatment delivery. The QA was performed during an ARIA upgrade. The first three parts passed successfully and there was no data lost, nor any data change. However, the end-to-end test reported the following issues: the ARIA user rights changed; ARIA missed the DICOM import/export connection to the third-party software; and one linear accelerator was not connected to ARIA. All of the issues were corrected before ARIA was released clinically. No further issues were reported after the clinical use.
Conclusion: A comprehensive QA program was developed for ROIS updates and was validated during a major ARIA upgrade. The successful QA results provided users with the confidence to deliver accurate and safe radiotherapy post upgrade.
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