Integration of Databases for Radiotherapy Outcomes Analyses

The technical nature of radiotherapy requires different data collection strategies for outcomes reporting than those required for most other disciplines in clinical medicine. To correlate advances in radiotherapy technology with treatment outcomes, it is necessary to integrate a given radiotherapy outcomes-study database with the record-and-verify database and with the global hospital database. The authors review the recent development of each of these categories of databases from the vantage point of radiotherapy. Their goal was to integrate these 3 databases for outcomes analyses in radiotherapy at their institution; this process involved (1) the construction of an interface between the record-and-verify database and the outcomes-study database and (2) the use of a bioinformatics database linking the outcomes-study database and the global hospital database. This bioinformatics database was successfully queried in a manner that allowed streamlining data flow of relevance to radiotherapy outcomes studies. Future directions of the application of this integration are discussed.