A systematic quality assurance framework for the upgrade of radiation oncology information systems

Abstract In spite of its importance, no systematic and comprehensive quality assurance (QA) program for radiation oncology information systems (ROIS) to verify clinical and treatment data integrity and mitigate against data errors/corruption and/or data loss risks is available. Based on data organization, format and purpose, data in ROISs falls into five different categories: (1) the ROIS relational database and associated files; (2) the ROIS DICOM data stream; (3) treatment machine beam data and machine configuration data; (4) electronic medical record (EMR) documents; and (5) user-generated clinical and treatment reports from the ROIS. For each data category, this framework proposes a corresponding data QA strategy to very data integrity. This approach verified every bit of data in the ROIS, including billions of data records in the ROIS SQL database, tens of millions of ROIS database-associated files, tens of thousands of DICOM data files for a group of selected patients, almost half a million EMR documents, and tens of thousands of machine configuration files and beam data files. The framework has been validated through intentional modifications with test patient data. Despite the ‘big data’ nature of ROIS, the multiprocess and multithread nature of our QA tools enabled the whole ROIS data QA process to be completed within hours without clinical interruptions. The QA framework suggested in this study proved to be robust, efficient and comprehensive without labor-intensive manual checks and has been implemented for our routine ROIS QA and ROIS upgrades.