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ICTs improve cancer treatment

Michelle Avenant
By Michelle Avenant, portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 28 Apr 2015

Cloud computing, big data and analytics can help provide better cancer treatment, say oncology experts in the public and private health sectors.

Hannah Simonds, head of radiation oncology at Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town and associate professor at Stellenbosch University, says the electronic patient management system employed at Tygerberg Hospital aids the treatment workflow and contributes to patient safety by eliminating administrational mix-ups or misplaced documents.

Simonds hopes the oncology department will eventually become paperless and says information from the system can soon be used for analytics.

Equra Health, a South African company offering cancer care management services, provides an example of how centralised databases can benefit cancer care. The company makes use of a centralised database of treatments and outcomes captured by its facilities across the country, says Rod Russell, CIO of Equra Health.

Analysing vast reserves of treatment and outcome data can help oncologists better predict successful treatment, says Russell.

Although SA has a National Cancer Registry of data, the registry is challenged by a lack of political and financial prioritisation, hampering its ability to produce regular reports.

Centralised data management can also facilitate the standardisation of treatment processes to ensure a uniform quality of care across branches, adds Erhardt Korf, COO of Equra Health.

Cloud computing can be of particular benefit to treatment planning. The planning of cancer radiation treatments is a specialised process with a limited number of people in SA with the skills for the work, says Korf.

Equra Health makes use of three centralised planning departments in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, each of which cater for four to eight therapy centres elsewhere in the country, Korf says. Centralising planning stations is an economical solution, as the planning workstations are costly due to their high processing capabilities, adds Russell.

However, the cost and availability of bandwidth in SA, particularly in more remote areas, presents significant challenges to sharing data resources across the country, Russell notes.

Awareness and education

ICTs such as social media pushed to mobile devices could be put to better use where cancer awareness and education are concerned.

SA faces a high incident of late-stage cancers due to a lack of public awareness of the disease, says Simonds. "If you don't have good access to multimedia information and education, there is an information gap, so people develop a symptom and don't know what it means," she explains.

Many delay seeking cancer treatment due to misconceptions about the fatality of the disease and the treatments available, she adds.

A number of SA state hospitals, such as Tygerberg, are equipped with state-of-the-art radiation equipment offering higher, more focused dosages of radiation to affected areas and greatly reducing the adverse effects on surrounding tissue, Simonds says.

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