Healthcare

The system enables the automatic generation of a treatment plan for cancer patients.

Technological Challenge:

One of the main weaknesses in the services provided in paediatric oncology in the hospitals of the Public Health System of Andalusia is that the clinical tasks and decision-making processes in the planning of cancer treatments are manual, without the help of specific IT tools. This fact negatively affects current trends in the healthcare sector, which attempt to offer efficient, quality care with total safety guaranteed for the patient.

These plans are presently drawn up manually by the paediatric oncologist, in a text document which is used as a guide for treatment in practice and patient monitoring. Thus, the tasks and clinical decisions of this crucial stage in the healthcare process are prepared manually, without the support of computer tools, clearly making it much more difficult to achieve the healthcare goals:

• Quality healthcare.
• Patient safety.
• Efficient provision of service.

Doctors are presented with major problems in achieving these objectives:

• Multiple variables in drugs and possible treatments.
• Multiple patient conditionants which may influence treatment.
• Time-consuming treatment design.
• Need to take complex medical protocols into account.

Solution:

OncoTheraper is an Intelligent System to assist in treatment planning in Paediatric Oncology, integrating the product IActive Intelligent Decisor, an intelligent component based on Smart Process Management technology, designed to help in decision making, capable of generating a treatment plan to assist paediatric oncologists in their tasks and decision making during the planning of treatment and the monitoring of cancer patients.

The oncologist users enter the objective, "ontological treatment" into the system, and based on the knowledge and interactive reasoning process of the product IActive Intelligent Decisor, OncoTheraper generates a process or plan which will be used by the doctor as support when determining the treatment to prescribe for the patient.

The operational cycle of OncoTheraper is as follows:

• The initial situation of the patient is established, using their clinical information to describe their specific state. IActive Intelligent Decisor runs a search and reasoning process in order to find the most suitable treatment.

• This step produces a personalised treatment plan for the patient. This plan will then be monitored to ensure the treatment is completed.

OncoTheraper was developed based on the product IActive Knowledge Studio, enabling the modelling of the expert knowledge of oncologists; in other words, it reproduces the experts’ knowledge in the Intelligent System, while permitting the integration of the smart component IActive Intelligent Decisor.

Advantages:

The advantages of using IActive Intelligent Decisor in cancer treatments are:

• Improved healthcare quality. Reducing the workload of paediatric oncologists by moving the decision-making process to an automatic reasoning process. This lets more time be devoted to personal attention to the patient.

• Increased patient safety. The decisions proposed by the system and accepted by the medical specialist will be validated automatically.

• Improved efficiency and co-ordination of healthcare resources. The techniques used in OncoTheraper enable treatment to be planned based on an automatic reasoning process for the available time and resources.