Beijing Cancer Hospital Utilizes Varian RapidPlan to Win IDC Digital Transformation Award

IDC, the world’s leading digital research firm, announced Beijing Cancer Hospital won a “2018 IDC China Digital Transformation Annual Award” in the category of Operating Model Master, for their successful clinical use of Varian‘s RapidPlan™. Beijing Cancer Hospital was the only winner from healthcare industry in this category.

RapidPlan is a part of Varian’s Eclipse™ cancer treatment planning software that uses machine learning to study the best practices from past successful treatment plans and creates intelligent mathematical models that automatically improve the quality of treatment plans for future patients. These RapidPlan models help to quickly generate and validate new high-quality treatment plans based on shared expertise of multiple clinicians.

The IDC award is to recognize outstanding organizations in China that have successfully implemented digital transformation. According to IDC’s research report, 60.7 percent of medical and health service organizations in the U.S. began digital transformation in 2017, with the application of cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence as the main features. The development of information technology has become a key driving force for the transformation of medical and health services. The application of artificial intelligence and precision medicine based on big data will become a necessary key technology to improve the level and efficiency of diagnosis and treatment.

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At the award ceremony, Hao WU, deputy director of Radiotherapy Department and Chief Medical Physicist of Beijing Cancer Hospital shared his experience on how primary level hospitals could take advantage of RapidPlan to help safeguard the quality of the radiotherapy treatment and improve radiotherapy capabilities. “Through rigorous preclinical testing and verification, our hospital has applied a rectal tumor model into clinical practices, and we have achieved satisfactory results in improving the quality and consistency of the plan and the efficiency of clinical workflow. The planning time for a single patient was reduced from several hours to several minutes, and with a result significantly superior to the manual plan and with high consistency. The application of RapidPlan could greatly help with the shortage of medical physicists in China. At the same time, primary level hospitals using shared models and could provide quality treatments to local patients who don’t have to travel far.”

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“To improve the survival rate of cancer patients, it is a must to elevate the capabilities of primary level medical institutions,” said Mo XING, vice president of Beijing Cancer Hospital. “As a top cancer center in China, it’s our mission and responsibility to drive the development of standardized treatment. Empowered by leading technologies, like AI, the leading institutions can help primary level institutions develop with speed and quality to benefit more patients.”

“C************** to Beijing Cancer Hospital for winning the award,” said Xiao ZHANG, vice president and managing director for Varian Greater China. “They are one of the pioneers in China to utilize RapidPlan in clinical practice, who have demonstrated great wisdom and clinical abilities. We also hope to work with more hospitals to build more models to benefit more patients in China. We believe by leveraging the power of technology, we can enable leading medical institutions to provide more precise and individualized treatments while primary level hospitals can provide quality treatment to patients.”

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