Wearable Patient-Tracking Device to Inform Time and Delivery of Radiotherapy

Alonso Gutierrez, MD, chief of Medical Physics at Baptist Health Miami Cancer Institute, discusses the initial results from a feasibility study which evaluated the use of a daily wearable patient-tracking device to optimize radiation machine use and time the delivery of treatment.

Transcription:

0:08 | The goal here of this study was we do have a software system that is both hardware and software that enables us to track patients throughout the clinic. So that we can, in essence, understand how long they're waiting and each area of the building, and also how long they're spending on each treatment machine. And so, one of the initiatives that we'd like to do here is obviously make the patient experience the best it could be. And one of them is to try to reduce the overall wait time and then try to optimize the delivery time. So, they can get their treatments in and out, primarily because most patients will visit the Center for radiation treatments, you know, anywhere from 25 to 35 times, or fractions that they deliver. So, we really want them to be able to come in and out not wait a lot and then get high quality treatment. Our goal here was to one, we needed to know where we were at. And part of the reason was to see how compliant everyone is wearing these devices.

1:04 | We did an initial assessment and realized that our compliance was not where I wanted to be. We pushed to improve our compliance. And we were able to get it to 70% of all our fractions for the last six months, which were large number of them we were able to get patients to I think I think we almost tripled the compliance factor for patients, which gave us very good data to take from there to understand how we do on each unit. We do have an essence seven treatment vaults, six or seven systems that we treat patients with. And we wanted to really see how each one of them performs and if there's any challenges of one system versus the other.