A vendor-neutral business analytics and quality measurement system for radiation dose index monitoring

Abstract

Radiation Dose Index (RDI) analytics tools are main components of the dose management systems in healthcare. Business analytics for radiation data can go from simple statistics to dynamic data analysis. It treats data visualization, analytics, and quality measurements. The complexity behind RDI analytics is not only about the technology used to create dashboards and compute quality measurements, but it is especially related to the complexity of collecting the data needed for the analytics tool. Most Dose Management Systems (DMS) are complex applications with many modules that provide multiple functionalities, like data collection, enhancement, and access. The central DMS module is the dose index tracker, which contains the data structure containing the radiation data collected from the different irradiating modalities from the various connected healthcare facilities. Most DMS modules are proprietary and connected to the dose index tracker without being independent of the vendor-specific dose database. Business analytics components in dose management systems have the same interoperability issue. Most of the radiation analytics tools and components have proprietary connectivity with a specific dose management system provider and cannot connect agnostically to different DMS providers. We design, test, and document multiple methods for radiation analytics to be agnostic and independent from the radiation dose index monitoring providers based on standardized Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) Application Programming Interfaces (API) connectivity.