Brno, Czech Republic, August 18, 2011 — Varian Medical Systems has successfully connected its ARIA® oncology information and Eclipse™ treatment planning systems to two Elekta Synergy linear accelerators. The milestone in connectivity occurred in just one week at St. Anne’s Faculty Hospital in Brno, the country’s second largest city, and radiotherapy treatments have commenced using the newly integrated system.
The hospital opted to replace its Elekta Mosaiq® software system with ARIA to bring two sites together on one network. “ARIA was selected because we feel its capabilities are all-embracing,” says Jan Garcic, head physicist at St. Anne’s. “The commissioning of the Elekta machines with ARIA and Eclipse was done successfully and has enabled us to carry out seamless radiotherapy planning, CT scanning and simulation. We can now create plans anywhere and for every radiotherapy treatment machine across our network.”
As a result, teams of therapists, oncologists and physicists are working with the same patient data on the same system at St. Anne’s and the nearby Masaryk Memorial Cancer Institute. Masaryk uses Varian software and treatment machines whereas St. Anne’s has operated using Elekta machines and software until the recent decision to convert its software suite. Together, the public hospitals are delivering advanced radiotherapy treatments for 3,000 new cancer patients each year.
“Since ARIA was centralized across the network, the workflow for both sites has improved considerably,” says Joachim Brazerol, Varian’s area sales manager. “Planar imagers created on the Elekta units are stored in ARIA and can be accessed in both sites for review. All treatment histories can be accessed from both sites without any imports or exports.” He paid tribute to the way all parties, including Varian’s local distributor Amedis Prague, collaborated to ensure a smooth installation.
The ARIA oncology information system is a comprehensive software solution that supports an oncology clinic. It combines an oncology-specific patient electronic medical record (EMR) with functional components for managing clinical, administrative and financial operations. ARIA is now in use at 2500 treatment centers around the world. It has been rated among the top three oncology IT solutions every year since 2008 by KLAS, an independent research firm that reports on the performance of healthcare vendors (www.klas.com).
About Varian Medical Systems
Varian Medical Systems, Inc., of Palo Alto, California, is the world's leading manufacturer of medical devices and software for treating cancer and other medical conditions with radiotherapy, radiosurgery, proton therapy, and brachytherapy. The company supplies informatics software for managing comprehensive cancer clinics, radiotherapy centers and medical oncology practices. Varian is a premier supplier of tubes and digital detectors for X-ray imaging in medical, scientific, and industrial applications and also supplies X-ray imaging products for cargo screening and industrial inspection. Varian Medical Systems employs approximately 5,700 people who are located at manufacturing sites in North America, Europe, and China and approximately 70 sales and support offices around the world. For more information, visit www.varian.com.
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