Oncology IT Solutions Designed for Cancer Centers’ Radiotherapy Planning

A new oncology information technology (IT) product range is comprised of a flexible set of wide-ranging IT systems for every sort of healthcare delivery system, from a single-site clinic to a geographically dispersed, multisite hospital network.

Varian Medical Systems (Palo Alto, CA, USA), a provider of oncology software, has developed a range of oncology-specific information technology (IT) systems designed to meet the needs of a high-tech cancer treatment center. Varian’s FullScale systems exploit virtualization or cloud technologies to deploy Varian software—both the Aria oncology information system and Eclipse treatment planning—in a flexible, scalable, effective, and widely accessible way, enabling treatment centers to exploit the economies of scale.

The FullScale range encompasses three types of deployments that can be adapted to meet the specific needs of each customer: (1) FullScale Appliance is an onsite system for smaller clinics. Varian installs and manages a specially designed turnkey appliance that houses the Aria and Eclipse applications securely behind the customer’s firewall. (2) FullScale Enterprise for larger customers houses Varian applications on virtual servers in the customer’s local data center. Varian installs, upgrades, monitors, and manages the software and system to ensure enterprise-class performance. (3) FullScale Cloud utilizes of virtual servers that are configured on physical servers at an off-site data center, with access permitted only for authorized users. The virtual servers can be moved without disruption from one physical server to another when more capacity is needed, making this the most optimized model for high availability, performance, and scalability in an off-site solution.

“The Varian FullScale Appliance offers the power of a complete and managed system, including Aria and Eclipse components. It allows us to focus on how we utilize Varian technologies to provide enhanced quality patient care instead of spending time on managing the various individual pieces of technology,” stated Randall Miller, chief medical physicist at Northeast Georgia Health System.

“FullScale is designed to minimize the need for capital expenditures and to simplify the processes of upgrading or migrating software, while enabling greater efficiency for a treatment center’s IT, administrative, and clinical staff,” said Kevin O'Reilly, senior director of product marketing for Varian’s oncology systems business. “Clinics using these solutions can avoid buying expensive servers that take up space, use a lot of power, and require extensive IT resources to manage and service. It’s a model that reduces the total cost of ownership and minimizes the downtime needed during upgrades to the system.”

Varian’s Fullscale IT solutions enable cancer treatment centers to embrace the power and promise of both virtualization and cloud offerings.

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