UCSF and RaySearch Enter Partnership Regarding the RayCare® Oncology Information System
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RaySearch Laboratories AB and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have entered into a long-term partnership regarding the RayCare® oncology information system (OIS), which is currently under development at RaySearch. RayCare® is a next-generation OIS that is designed to meet the future challenges of cancer care. In this partnership, RayCare® will enable UCSF Radiation Oncology to push the envelope in delivering world-class, highly specialized cancer care. At the same time, important input will be provided for the development of RayCare®.
RayCare® will support complex procedures and analyses that are out of reach with current information management systems. UCSF has ongoing projects on genomics and big data, which strive to increase knowledge about cancer and cancer care. The RaySearch/UCSF partnership is intended to develop a step-wise and comprehensive approach to provide data infrastructure to be used for clinical decision support and individualization of cancer care within radiation oncology.
If the collected data is sufficiently structured, advanced tools for analyzing enormous amounts of data, so called big data analysis, can help discover new causal relationships, such as between genomic profile, delivered dose and outcome. RayCare® will become a key component in collecting and structuring treatment and follow-up data and enable pooling of data and analysis using other systems.
In delivering a complete cancer treatment, hundreds of steps have to be performed by a team of several different specialists, all in a carefully orchestrated fashion. To increase efficiency and safety, it is necessary for RayCare® to present the right amount of information in an intelligible way and allow the users to take necessary action with minimal effort. Streamlining the usability of RayCare® is an integral part of the partnership.
Another key feature of RayCare® is to optimize the use of resources in the clinic. The resources include treatment machines, accessories and imaging systems, etc., as well as human resources represented by physicists, therapists, oncologists and other members of the care team. The choice of, for instance, treatment technique, target localization and treatment delivery system determines the resource requirements while also influencing the treatment plan quality. RayCare® is built to integrate resource utilization, plan quality assessment and scheduling in one system.
“UCSF is an ideal partner for this exciting project. It is not only a world-leading institution in terms of quality of care, UCSF Radiation Oncology also offers a diverse environment of treatment machines and other systems, making it a formidable proving ground for RayCare®. But perhaps even more important is the inspiration and motivation we get from working with the devoted and skilled team at UCSF,” says Johan Löf, CEO of RaySearch.
“There is a strong need for a new approach to information management within cancer care. The Radiation Oncology department is a natural place to start this development since we are involved in cancer treatment for virtually all types of cancer. Already today, Radiation Oncology has a very complex flow of information, which is difficult to manage with current systems.
Our goal is to find a system that will provide higher efficiency in our clinic and enable us to support future initiatives within adaptive radiation therapy and precision medicine that would otherwise be impossible,” says Catherine Park, M.D., professor in residence and Chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology, UCSF.
