SU‐E‐T‐249: Information Systems Infrastructure and Architecture for a Large Integrated and Centralized Oncology System
Purpose: To design and implement an Oncology Information System (OIS) around an existing IT infrastructure to optimize performance, meet clinical requirements, and minimize implementation costs. University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) is a large health system with 50 medical and radiation oncology centers. To improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient centric care, an initiative was undertaken to integrate the patients' data and health information of all cancer centers on a centralized OIS with interfaces to the rest of the UPMC and affiliated hospitals. Methods: The OIS must incorporate the existing isolated oncology systems and devices and aggregate all of the patient's electronic medical records (EMR) including imaging, planning, and treatment creating a single point of patient information reference built upon the existing UPMC infrastructure. The distributed nature of UPMC CancerCenter and its multi‐vendor systems requires rigorous evaluation and testing for multiple levels of software, hardware, infrastructure, and environmental platforms and comparison and validation of their capabilities with the clinical workflow. Results: We successfully implemented the “integrated and centralized” OIS with ARIA at 16 of the 22 radiation and 5 of the 28 medical oncology sites at the rate of 1 site every 2 months. We completed all inbound and outbound interfaces transferring data to and from ARIA and other UPMC systems. We interfaced 1 of 9 affiliated Non‐UPMC health systems. Conclusion: To fit the OIS technical and clinical requirements with existing health system IT infrastructure and maximize the OIS performance at minimum cost, we customized OIS data locations providing the best data flow patterns across the network. This provided a comprehensive Electronic Health Record from multiple EMRs and platforms giving physicians a unique view into each patient's information. The OIS optimized the best options for medical oncology, radiation oncology, image based planning, and image guided radiotherapy and radiosurgery.