These are major questions in oncology today. What if you could realize efficient workflows across your cancer care domains and locations?
What if you could effectively translate best practices across locations within your health system? What if you could automate processes within the care pathways, driving efficiency and consistency of care, and shortening the time to diagnosis and treatment while increasing both patient and staff satisfaction?
This article will look at two examples of overcoming complex workflows in two oncology domains: pathology and radiation oncology.
Challenge
Achieving an efficient and accurate diagnosis and personalized therapy care pathway for each oncology patient is complex because of the numerous workflows and large amounts of diagnostic data, as well as the growing number of available therapy options.
Solution
Integrate and optimize oncology workflows within and across the many specialties involved in cancer care, providing timely standardization and consistency.
Results
Enhance productivity and collaboration with digital pathology.
Accelerate and streamline complex radiation oncology workflows with intelligent patient management.
Speed and efficiency in workflows across specialties have a huge impact on the patient experience, staff experience, and ultimately patient outcomes. The challenge that many cancer teams face today is that precision diagnosis and treatment involve multiple specialty departments and can span multiple care locations, depending on the patient and the health system.
How can you provide precise diagnosis and treatment with the efficiency, consistency and quality that each patient deserves? Integrating and optimizing oncology workflows within and across specialties and providers is key to reducing delays, inefficiencies and hand-offs. Let's examine two examples of overcoming complex workflows, first in pathology and then in radiation oncology.
Digital workflows can increase productivity by 25%1 and eliminate delays that occur when pathologists are waiting for analog slides to be delivered. It also enables cases to easily be routed to specialists within the pathology department as well as allowing for remote reading, collaboration and consultation across geographies. Digital tools can also streamline and improve the robustness of pathology with automated (AI-based) tissue characterization, reducing the amount of human interaction needed to come to a definitive diagnosis.
When workflows are all digital, seamless integration with pathology, oncology and radiology specialties is possible.
I think digital pathology, by allowing us to have experts in remote sites real-time read a case with us, it just basically shrinks the world. It makes us have access to people it might take a great amount of time to send a case to. It’ll bring us closer together and we’ll have the ability to give patients even better-quality diagnoses."
Julie Steele, MD
Department Chair of Pathology Scripps Clinical Medical Group & Service Line Director, Oncologic Pathology for the Scripps, MD Anderson Cancer Center
Radiation therapy can be effective in helping patients overcome cancer. At the same time, radiotherapy processes are often fragmented and inefficient. Radiation oncology planning is labor-intensive with frequent handovers, long wait times and lags in data transfers between systems that can impact quality and increase time to treatment.
Uncertainties along the way can impact quality and make it difficult to consistently provide accurate, timely treatment. This can prove even more challenging for cancer centers that support multiple sites across locations and want the efficiency and productivity that make it possible to deliver high-quality personalized treatment.
One of the things that I see as a roadblock in so many centers is coordination between the various aspects of a department. In order to make a facility flow properly you want to make sure that the left hand and the right hand know what each other are doing."
Lane Rosen, M.D.
Director of Radiation Oncology, Willis-Knighton Cancer Center
Go Deeper
Are you interested in learning more about how these solutions can help you address your challenges?
Video
Watch the video about Granada University Hospital and digital pathology
Brochure
Read the “Sharing multiplies the value of knowledge” brochure about digital pathology
Article
Read the Expert Perspectives article on 'Implementation of digital histopathology at North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust'
Radiation Oncology Orchestrator
Radiation Oncology Orchestrator is an intelligent patient management solution designed to streamline and accelerate workflow from referral of the patient to the start of treatment by managing complexity, improving efficiency and enabling operational excellence.
Go Deeper
Are you interested in learning more about how these solutions can help you address your challenges?
Case study
Discover how the South West Wales Cancer Centre is orchestrating its oncology workflows
Article
Read the Expert Perspectives article on “Streamlining radiation oncology workflows with the Radiation Oncology Orchestrator”
Challenge
Achieving an efficient and accurate diagnosis and personalized therapy care pathway for each oncology patient is complex because of the numerous workflows and large amounts of diagnostic data, as well as the growing number of available therapy options.
Solution
Integrate and optimize oncology workflows within and across the many specialties involved in cancer care, providing timely standardization and consistency.
Results
Enhance productivity and collaboration with digital pathology.
Accelerate and streamline complex radiation oncology workflows with intelligent patient management.
Results from case studies are not predictive of results in other cases. Results in other cases may vary.
* Histology cases on average 3-5 slides per case.
You are about to visit a Philips global content page
You are about to visit the Philips USA website.
You are about to visit a Philips global content page
You are about to visit the Philips USA website.