ESTRO 2024 - Abstract Book

S4851

Physics - Quality assurance and auditing

ESTRO 2024

1923

Digital Poster

The Use of Automation to Improve Compliance and Timeliness in Radiation Oncology Chart Review

Nels C Knutson, Tom Mazur, Matthew C Schmidt, Yu Wu, Jason Labrash, Jon Hansen, Geoffrey D Hugo, Michael T Prusator

Washington University, Radiation Oncology, St Louis, USA

Purpose/Objective:

Weekly physics chart checks play an important role in radiation oncology, having been shown to be one of the most effective means at catching potential errors 1 . Ensuring their timely completion is crucial for the chart review to be effective. The purpose of this work is to investigate the use of automation in management and assignment of weekly physics chart review. We investigate the potential improvements in compliance and timeliness of patient chart checks in radiation oncology departments using automation vs. those that do not.

Material/Methods:

A standalone application was created to automate the assignment and management of weekly medical physics patient chart checks completed within the radiation oncology department across multiple centers, including a primary site and seven satellite facilities in the metropolitan. The application assigns weekly chart checks every morning at 8:00 AM to a team of approximately 30 physicists across the system based on the completed treatments recorded the previous day in the institutional record and verify system (Aria 15.6, Varian Medical Systems, Palo Alto CA, USA). The program also sends out an automated email fto notify physicists of any charts that were not completed the previous day at 7:30 am prior to the next assignment. If a weekly chart check was not completed from the previous day the chart is automatically reassigned to a new physicists in the pool and the group is notified in the assignment email. A review of compliance, defined as completion and documentation of all weekly chart check tasks within the RV system, was then completed for a time period of 01/2022 to 10/2023. The compliance for weekly chart checks was collected for centers with the automated tool and compared to a control center without the automated assignment tool to see if there was a meaningful impact in compliance, as defined by a Fischer's exact test for statistical significance between groups.

Results:

In 2023, in the review of clinics with automated chart check assignment 5 chart reviews were found to be out of compliance out of 22,697 possible chart reviews. In comparison, clinic without automated assignment had 6 out of 2857 non-compliant chart reviews in the same time period. These differences were significant according to the Fischer's exact test (p<0.0001)