The Cross border Virtual Tumor Board has been implemented as part of the European Reference Network for Pediatric oncology project.
Problem
Children cancers are one of the most challenging diseases in nowadays healthcare. From one point of view they are relatively rare, so there is lack of high skilled experts for chosen cancer type in each hospital. From the other point of view, the child cancers are often developing fast, leaving almost no time for medical professionals to define and take proper response actions. There are experts spread around different hospitals having the capacity to offer adequate consultations to colleagues, but not being in the position to hold physical meetings across the Europe.
Aim
The mission has been to reduce current inequalities in childhood cancer survival and healthcare capabilities in different EU Member States. The main goal of the project is to enable the European pediatric oncology community with an Interoperable cloudbased solution that supports virtual conference rooms embedded in the health portal functionalities.
Solution
The solution was delivered bundling two cutting-edge products in their domains, Cisco Acano and Vitaly. Interoperable Virtual Tumor Board (VTB) solution provided in the collaboration with Austrian Institute of Technology and Cisco Systems shows the way, how cloud-based collaboration software embedded in the health portal solution helps to:
- Interconnect medical experts from different geographic locations without having the need to physically meet;
- Increase the efficiency of consultations among medical experts providing them simultaneous access to patient’s medical data when performing virtual conference meetings;
- Increase the speed and reliability of the decisions taken;
- Supporting new business models that allows rare medical experts to provide consultations and thus help children to access the appropriate care in a cost efficient way.
- Overall process is standardized to cover the following steps of tumor board meetings:
- A specialist (VTB requestor) requests a medical board review for a patient to the VTB scheduler, who sends the request including necessary demographic, clinical and diagnostic information.
- The VTB scheduler checks if the patient meets the inclusion criteria of the board, and looks for a timeslot to schedule the patient case.
- The VTB scheduler sends the affirmation to the requester.
- All VTB chairpersons / preparators can prepare for the medical board review by viewing and examining all the relevant medical information.
- At the medical board review meeting, all VTB chairpersons / preparators discuss the case.
- A VTB scribe / report writer writes down the recommendations of the board.
- The medical board review report is authorized by VTB finalizer and any other participant, and sent to the requester.
Standards
Complying with widely adopted international healthcare standards like Integrating Healthcare Enterprise (IHE – profiles) and Health Level 7 (HL7 – messages), VTB solution supports cross border expansion of reference network member hospitals while maintaining seamless data interchange. Specialized IHE profile used to support VTB specific workflow is XTB-WD and is collaborating with other standard profiles and messages within the portal like:
- HL7 V2 and V3;
- FHIR 1.0.2;
- DICOM;
- XDS.b-I;
- Other IHE profiles.
YEAR
2016 – Present
META
Virtual Tumor Boards, VTB, interoperability, IHE, HL7, DICOM, Pediatric, Oncology
NUMBERS
50 users (first phase rollout)3 cross border medical institutions Following roll-outs to cover 60+ institutions