MD Anderson and Varian announce strategic collaboration to optimize radiation oncology treatment

Reviewed by Kate Anderton, B.Sc. (Editor)Oct 17 2019

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Varian today announced a new strategic collaboration to develop an integrated software platform to streamline review of radiation oncology treatment plans.

The goal of the platform is to establish an efficient framework to connect participating sites to a central database, allowing MD Anderson physicians to host collaborative review sessions around treatment plans and to communicate plan changes back to physicians. As the platform matures, it has the potential to be deployed at all MD Anderson locations and across MD Anderson Cancer Network^®.

Radiation oncology is a highly technical specialty that relies on the interoperability of a variety of hardware and software components. We believe the development of this unified platform with Varian will enable expansion of our radiation oncology quality standards to provide the best available care to more patients."

Albert Koong, M.D., Ph.D., professor and division head of Radiation Oncology, MD Anderson

MD Anderson Cancer Network, a program of MD Anderson Cancer Center, collaborates with community hospitals and health care systems around the globe to provide higher quality and advanced care to patients in the communities in which they live.

In addition to the software platform, the partnership will work to develop evidence-based tools to improve the analysis of various quality measures, with a focus on:

-Minimizing the volume of radiation dose distributed to nearby healthy organs, resulting in fewer side effects for patients

-Automating the comparison of treatment plans to MD Anderson and national quality criteria, enabling the development of new standard value and safety metrics

-Decreasing the time needed to review radiation treatment plans, improving efficiency and expanding access

"We are honored to work with MD Anderson on developing a new software platform that helps ensure patients across the MD Anderson Cancer Network receive a higher standard of care regardless of location," said Corey Zankowski, senior vice president, Oncology Software Solutions, Varian. "Innovative partnerships like this will help us achieve our vision of a world without fear of cancer."