ASTRO 2015
Mobile app designed to help manage radiation therapy toxicities
Dr Malolan Rajagopalan - Mount Carmel Health System, Columbus, USA
I’ve been working with the Radiation Oncology Institute, or the ROI, which is the foundation of ASTRO. What we’ve been doing over the past two years, basically, is being able to develop a tool for symptom management. So the idea behind what our project is is that for patients undergoing radiation they develop a lot of symptoms of toxicities from the treatment and the strategies to manage it are not standardised across the country and the world. So what we’ve tried to do is tried to aggregate the best practices, the evidence based strategies, for symptoms management and put them into a tool. So we developed the radiation oncology toolbox which essentially does that. It’s an app and a website which aggregates the best practices for symptoms management. We have about eight symptoms now that we’re helping manage and trying to show the best evidence to manage it both as a prophylactic as well as a treatment measure.
What are the eight symptoms covered by the app and website?
The eight symptoms that we have are anything from oral mucositis, dermatitis, GI toxicities are included in there, including esophagitis, loose stools, pain and a few others.
How would someone use the app?
The idea is that the clinician in the clinic sees the patient maybe developing oral mucositis, they can easily pull up this app, click through and see what the evidence based strategies are for managing it. So if they come across a strategy that they’d like to employ you just click the button and it tells you how you prescribe the medication, what the potential interactions or side effects are, it tells you about the formula so you can easily write the medication for them and gives a summary of the background behind why it works and what the evidence is behind it. It’s a tool to both educate the clinician as well as to influence how he or she practices in the clinic to improve patient care.
How far along in the development process are you?
We’re on our second beta right now so it’s pretty close to being released publically now. We’re hoping by early 2016 it will be publically available on the iTunes store. As part of the app we developed a few other features, too, and that’s part of what we’ve been doing. We have a few features as far as calculators to help convert doses; we have toxicity scales to help clinicians usually rate toxicities; we have DVH parameters so clinicians can, with one click, be able to access dose constraints for various disease sites to try to make all the best data available to the clinician at his or her fingertips.
I think this has applicability for patients across the world. The toxicities that patients undergo when they’re getting cancer treatment is similar and the strategies that we’re using come from trials that have been done in the United States as well as internationally. We’re trying to pull the best evidence from across the world to try to improve the care for these patients.
We plan to have regularly scheduled updates and the nice thing about having this type of medium, as opposed to either a journal article or some of the other ways that we’ve disseminated information before, this gives us the opportunity to rapidly integrate new data and push it out to the people that are using it on a pretty rapid basis. So we have a quick turnaround time that we are able to achieve with this type of medium. So we plan to regularly update it as we move forward.
Where can people find out more about the app?
Our website right now is rotoolbox.com and if you go there some of the data is already available there. We’ll announce early 2016 when the app is fully available for download.
This has been funded by the Radiation Oncology Institute and so we’ve been fortunate to get the generous support from them to be able to develop and get this far. Our goal is to make this completely freely available because we want to get the information out to as many people as we can.
