ESTRO 2024 - Abstract Book

S2801

Interdisciplinary - Health economics & health services research

ESTRO 2024

Purpose/Objective:

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has posed numerous challenges to healthcare systems worldwide, impacting various medical specialties, including radiation oncology departments. This study aims to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on a radiation oncology department and explores a hypothetical scenario of how the department would have operated without the pandemic, utilizing process mining and predictive models.

Material/Methods:

This study includes all patients who provided research informed consent and were scheduled for radiotherapy treatment between 2017 and 2021 at our department. We compared the actual data collected during the pandemic with simulated data from a hypothetical COVID-free period, generated by a machine learning model trained on real data before the 08/03/202. The density and the volume of treatments were used as units of comparison. The analysis was conducted using R v 4.2.2 and the pMineR v.046 library.

Results:

The study analyzed a total of 34,409 events, corresponding to 6,383 treatments administered from January 1, 2017, to December 31, 2021. Our analysis reveals significant changes in patient flow and resource utilization, which coincide with the outbreak of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic and subsequent lockdown measures implemented in Italy (from 08/03/2020 to 16/01/2021). The data from this period accounts for only 63,2% of the prescription events observed in the preceding period of the same duration, indicating a substantial decrease in the utilization of radiotherapy services during the pandemic. We stratified the treatments into priority ranks, demonstrating a reduction in attended treatments, in particular for elective treatments (Table 1). Furthermore, we analyzed the pathologies primarily affected by the decrease in treatment volume, finding that GU, Thorax, H&N, Breast pathologies as well as metatastasis were the most affected.

Table 1

Conclusion:

This study enhances our understanding of the consequences of COVID-19 in radiation oncology departments and provides insights for future healthcare crises. Further analysis will be conducted to better stratify the population