Summary

CHRISTUS Health is a not-for-profit health system with locations in four states in the USA. Six comprehensive cancer centers treat more than 2,000 patients annually. Our partnership has helped the health system develop a higher-quality, more efficient network.

This multi-year Advanced Oncology Solution partnership from Varian, a Siemens Healthineers Company, has accelerated the adoption of tech-enabled radiation-oncology services. These include an integrated oncology network platform for secure collaboration between oncologists across the health system, paperless forms to optimize the electronic health record, cloud-based remote and on-site treatment planning, and coding and compliance review services.

This end-to-end oncology engagement has offered CHRISTUS Health ongoing support and maintenance on system technology at seven radiation oncology centers across Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico. It also fostered the development of hybrid remote and onsite treatment planning and quality assurance program, while working directly with local providers to ensure excellence in patient care. Similarly, the deployment of cloud-based services has increased efficiencies and reduced costs across the entire network.

CHRISTUS Health

The Challenge

  • Optimize Clinical Operation: Deploying the latest medical software and technology-enabled processes to improve operational efficiency.
  • Increase Efficiency: Ensure budgetary security and streamline hybrid operations.
  • Drive Digital Transformation: Leveraging digitalization to provide high-quality patient care.

The Challenge

  • Propose an individualised treatment for each patient: Improve communication across the care team
  • Improve efficiency: Offer a higher quality of care with the same (less) costs and less effort
  • Use big data to drive decisions: Increased capability to retrieve data that provides operational and clinical oversights

The Result

  • Decreased costs and overhead
  • Increased quality and efficiency
  • Standardized clinical operations across the network
  • Achieved operational and financial stability

The Result

  • Workflow analysis: identified delays, redundancies and potential risks in the patient journey by considering the details, time required and appropriate actions for each step.
  • Centralisation of processes and data by redefining the complete patient pathway and by implementing a paperless workflow.
  • Consolidation of medical data from unconnected systems into a patient-centred record with implementation of interfaces
  • Deployment of tools to automate planning processes
  • Definition of the new organisation (design, configuration, training, monitoring)

The Benefits

 

Time Saving

 

Shortened patient pathway

 

Use of clinical data for clinical & operational decision making

This partnership offers our patients access to more advanced technology and the clinical benefits from centralized management of our oncology network. This improves quality and enhances operational efficiencies by leveraging the Oncology-as-a-Service approach to providing comprehensive solutions.

—Dr. David Benner, VP of Clinical Ancillary Services, CHRISTUS Health

With the support and expertise provided by a Varian clinical consultant, we have been able to maximize our use of ARIA, improve contribution from all staff groups, develop an electronic patient record and dramatically reduce paper. This service has been essential to our progression and given us tools for future development...

—Radiotherapy Department, Ninewells Hospital, NHS Tayside

We didn’t want to open our new department using merely default techniques. We wanted to use the ARIA system properly from the beginning because we knew that if we didn’t, it would be very difficult to move on and improve in the future...

—Andrew Reilly, Head of Radiotherapy Physics at North West Cancer Centre, Londonderry, Northern Ireland

Your ally in building a Cancer Center of Excellence

You face unique challenges at every step of your cancer center’s journey. That’s why every engagement is a collaborative process that starts with assessing and understanding your needs. We then offer uncomplicated, value-centric solutions for high-quality care delivery, and leverage our expertise, best practices, and full product portfolio to help you optimize your operations, people, and processes.

Our Oncology-as-a-Service (OaaS) offering is our new frontier in cancer care. With benefits centered around our core principles of increasing quality and efficiency while reducing costs, we assist customers in planning and developing high-quality cancer care services.

We develop and execute long-term strategies for oncology centers of excellence with innovative medical technology, digitally-enabled services, and clinical care support to provide a comprehensive solution for providers and patients globally.

The OaaS approach offers a unique combination of technology, our experts’ deep oncology experience, and our global reach to help your center achieve its immediate and long-term goals.

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