Motivation

Pain is a powerful motivator

Description

Motivation

Pain is a powerful motivator

What we had

  • 150+ spreadsheets
  • Fragmented data entry interfaces
  • Painful to review and approve
  • Painful to generate plots
  • Painful to add new tests

What we wanted

  • Single point of access
  • Consistent data entry interface
  • Straightforward review and approval
  • Easy to look at data trends
  • Quick test modifications

Let’s Buy Something

No need to reinvent the wheel

  • Atlas comes closest to what we wanted
  • Not straightforward for therapists
  • Test frequencies hard wired (Daily, Monthly, Annual)
  • Not web based
  • Not extendable
  • Cost?

Let’s Build Something!

Perils of an in-house system

  • Previous attempts
  • We are not software developers!
  • Risky — Is this even going to work?
  • Very low “bus factor”
http://adamprescott.net/2012/12/04/lean-development-teams/

Mitigating the Risk

  • Develop prototype
    • Proof of concept
    • Allowed for time estimate
    • Demonstrate developer competency :)
  • Open Source
    • Give it away
    • Build a community of users
    • Mutual benefit for TOHCC & Medical Physics community
    • (Hopefully) increases the projects bus factor
  • Go for it!

QATrack+

QATrack+ at TOHCC

From Development to the Clinic

Dec 2011
Prototype
Jan 2012
Started development
Jul 2012
Gather feedback from Therapy focus group
Aug 2012
First clinical pilot: Tomotherapy Morning QA
Sep 2012
Train Therapists: two 20min sessions
Oct 2012
Begin clinical rollout of daily QA
Dec 2012
Monthly QA rolled out as time permitted
Jan 2013
Start publicizing

Some Numbers

That’s a lot of data!

  • Clinical for ~8 months
  • 140 users over (use Active Directory!) spread over 2 campuses
  • 140 test lists made up of 1400 tests
  • 10 000 test lists completed
  • 170 000 test results

Why you shouldn’t use QATrack+ :(

  • No official or paid support
  • No guarantees about future development
  • Still a very young project – continuing to evolve
  • Not a turnkey operation (ask Ned!)
  • Learning curve for configuration (ask Jason!)

 

Open source is only free if your time is worthless    — Someone on the Internet

Why you should use QATrack+ :)

  • Features
  • Free (as in “free beer!”) and free (as in “free speech”)
  • Still a very young project – help to evolve it
  • Extensible
    • Modify yourself or hire someone to do it for you
  • Transparent development process
    • Bug reports
    • Feature requests

Open source is worth it!    — Me

The Future

  • New test types (v0.2.7)
    • File uploads
    • Strings
  • Data Export (v0.2.7)
  • Inventory (v0.3.0)
  • Event Log (v0.3.0)
  • Plugin System
  • Reporting (Compliance)
  • Data Archiving
  • Improved Plots (scatter plots etc)

Thank You!

email: rataylor@toh.on.ca
slides: randlet.com/papers-talks/

Demo