Remote monitoring software improves patient care, efficiency at cancer center

Computerworld - Remote monitoring and service software used at the Dale and Frances Hughes Cancer Center has become indispensable in keeping cancer patients on their treatment schedules and improving the center's overall efficiency.

And such software is taking on added value as organizations go "green" and the economy pushes them to cut costs.

The cancer center, in East Stroudsburg, Pa., serves as many as 40 patients per day, using complex medical equipment that tracks patient medical records along with treatment regimens.

ServiceLink software from Axeda Corp. in Foxborough, Mass., keeps track of the status and functioning of the medical equipment and alerts remote technicians of problems, said Louis Nardella, a medical physicist at the center.

"Without the equipment servers working, we can't treat anybody," Nardella said. "They are our lifeline."

In 2001, the cancer center chose Varian Medical Systems in Palo Alto, Calif., to provide its cancer treatment equipment. The equipment is integrated with ServiceLink in a complex patient treatment application called Eclipse, according to Varian officials and Nardella. There have been regular updates to ServiceLink, including the addition this year of sophisticated reporting tools, said Brian Anderson, vice president of marketing at Axeda.

If something goes wrong with the equipment or the treatment system, technicians are notified remotely and can work on a secure network connection to fix the problem, Nardella said. Device manufacturers such as Varian have used ServiceLink to reduce the number of on-site repair visits by 20%, saving up to six hours and $2,000 per visit, an Axeda spokesman said. Potential problems can also be spotted and repaired before a service is disrupted.

Another benefit is that "a remote service is green and prevents truck rolls," Anderson said.

Nardella said that earlier this year, workers at the cancer center got a "nasty message from the equipment that memory allocation was beyond limits." The problem was fixed in a matter of minutes remotely by having more memory allocated to a needed function from a pool of servers, he said.

Problems occur less than once a month with the machines, but the cancer center doesn't want to face a prolonged outage that would require sending a patient home to come another day. "If a patient misses a day of treatment, that's not good -- and we lose a day of reimbursements and productivity," Nardella said. Some problems that used to take 45 minutes to fix now might be fixed in three minutes, he said.

In addition to tracking patient records and schedules, Varian's medical equipment system for cancer treatment can track the functions of machines, including water temperature and measurements of radiation in a treatment area, a Varian spokeswoman said. Varian has about 13,000 medical devices deployed with the monitoring software, said Daniel DuBeau, the company's program manager for remote-access product support.

Nardella said the overall cost of the Varian service, including the remote monitoring capabilities, is about $200,000 per year. But, he added, "there's no question it's worth it. We don't want to have downtime, and we want to keep patients satisfied."