The project
The National Institute of Healthcare Management, through the National Dosimetry Centre, is working on a project for the creation of a National Patient Dose Bank (NPDB) for the entire National Health System. This NPDB will make it possible to compile, unify and monitor all the information on radiological interventions.
The increasing use of diagnostic imaging modalities using ionising radiation (CT, X-ray, Mammography, Nuclear Medicine, etc.) is leading those responsible for Radiation Protection of patients, both national and internationally, to establish increasingly strict dose control mechanisms.
Within the framework of compliance with current national and European legislation, institutions are required to keep records of the dose indicators received by patients and to periodically establish reference levels to optimise these doses for the benefit of patient protection.
The NPDB was created in response to this need to centralise information and update reference levels. It will be a digital platform that will use Machine Learning and Business Intelligence to analyse the data from the radiation sessions that each individual receives throughout their lives. These tools will facilitate the work of professionals in their daily activity. In addition, an anonymised data repository will be created that will serve both doctors and the international scientific community to discover the generation of hidden patterns and complex associations, detect overexposure to radiation, and relate it to derived problems in an intelligent way.
Challenges
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Centralisation of existing dose information throughout the National Health System -
Integration with the Autonomous Regions' information systems -
Automatic updating of dose reference levels -
Anonymised information repository for patient dose optimisation and research
The solution
Izertis proposes a technical design for the architecture of the NPDB that stands out for:
- Modular design where each part of the solution has clearly defined responsibilities.
- Synchronisation mechanisms between modules that enable the ingestion of large volumes of information without loss of data.
- Design based on AWS cloud technology, which provides the scalability, elasticity, availability, accessibility and cost efficiency required for a project of national scale.
- GDPR and ENS Compliance.
- Integration with NHS information systems such as the Digital Health Record (HCD-SNS) and the Individual Health Card patient identification system (TSI-SNS).
- Integration with AWS artificial intelligence services for training, creation and deployment of AI models.
- Integration with AWS business intelligence services for the creation and management of reports and dashboards.
- Development and implementation of a proof of concept (PoC) available to the client to validate the proposed design and technologies.
- A project plan is proposed for the complete development and implementation of the NPDB from the first pilot phases to the full integration of all the Autonomous Regions of the NHS.
The result
This first design and proof-of-concept phase carried out by Izertis has provided the client with a detailed technical design and solution proposal, based on previously existing components of General Electric Health Care's DoseWatch TM solution, for dose capture and management, which allows optimising development costs.
The approach includes a set of services, technologies and technological components and integration mechanisms between them that will make it possible to respond to the customer's needs.
By deploying the proof of concept, the proposed technologies can also be validated by means of a partially functional prototype that will serve as a demonstrator of the basic functionalities as well as a showcase of the capabilities of the overall system, based on the proposed technological solutions.