Automation in Action: Promoting High-Quality Workflows at Every Step

It’s well-known that automation is a powerful force in radiation oncology, possessing the ability to reshape our patient care paths for greater efficiency, more precise outputs, and higher quality treatment care. While automation conveys benefits at the task level, solutions can be combined for a synergistic effect at the practice level. 

In this session, physicist Ryan Hecox from Intermountain Health demonstrates the clinical impact of automation for various clinical tasks within the patient carepath. In addition, he enumerates the high-level benefits of stacking multiple solutions for greater throughput, resiliency, and process improvement. 

The presentation includes a walkthrough of their patient workflow, starting from contouring and planning structure generation, passing through planning and plan verification, and following through with on-treatment checks and billing. Ryan provides an assessment of the net benefit of having implemented automation at multiple points along the workflow, motivating this analysis with quantitative metrics (total time savings) as well as qualitative evaluations. 

Key Takeaways:

• Understand how automation plays a role in efficiency, safety, and quality across a range of radiation therapy workflow checkpoints

• Discuss the high-level benefits for patient care as a result of stacking automation tools along various key points of the patient care path

• Highlight the value and flexibility that automation lends to other related aspects of radiation oncology, such as staff attraction and retention, ability to handle emergency treatments, and ability to focus on critical patient-related tasks