Pattern of care in radiotherapy at a University Hospital in Spain: the RENORT project

RENORT is a novel data mining application developed to extract relevant clinical data from oncology information systems (OIS; ARIA and Mosaiq) used in radiation oncology (RO).

We used RENORT to extract demographic and clinical data from the OIS of all patients treated at the RO Department at the General Hospital of Valencia during the year 2019.

A total of 1158 treatments were performed. The female/male ratio was 39.3%/60.7%, with a mean age of 66 years. The mean waiting time between the treatment decision/proposal to the first visit was 10.1 days. Mean duration of the treatment preparation process was 21 days. Most patients (90.4%) completed treatment within the prescribed time ± 7 days. The most common sites/treatment types were: metastatic/palliative treatments (n = 300; 25.9%), breast (209; 18.0%), genitourinary (195; 16.8%), digestive (116; 10.0%), thoracic (104; 9.0%), head and neck (62; 5.4%), and skin cancer (51; 4.4%). The distribution according to treatment intent was as follows: palliative (n = 266; 23.0%), adjuvant curative (335; 28.9%), radical without adjuvant treatment (229; 19.8%), radical with concomitant treatment (188; 16.2%), curative neoadjuvant (70; 6.0%), salvage radiotherapy (61; 5.3%); and reirradiation (9; 0.8%). The most common treatment techniques were IMRT/VMAT with IGRT (n = 468; 40.4%), 3D-CRT with IGRT (421; 36.4%), SBRT (127; 11.0%), 2DRT (57; 4.9%), and SFRT (56; 4.8%). A mean of 15.9 fractions were administered per treatment. Hypofractionated schemes were used in 100% of radical intent breast and prostate cancer treatments.

The RENORT application facilitates data retrieval from oncology information systems to allow for a comprehensive determination of the real role of radiotherapy in the treatment of cancer patients. This application is valuable to identify patterns of care and to assess treatment efficacy.