Experiences of using a computer-aided therapy planning for pediatric oncology in clinical routine

Abstract

A system for computer aided therapy planning in pediatric oncology (CATIPO) is introduced, which is in routine use in about 20 clinics all over Germany. The system mainly consists of a knowledge acquisition tool for entering protocol-specific knowledge and a decision support tool for deriving a patient-specific therapy plan. The benefit of the system is that mistakes can be avoided and the effort for deriving a particular therapy plan can be decreased. The limitation of CATIPO is that is offers basic decision support for therapy planning and is not yet integrated in a comprehensive electronic patient record. It can be assumed that the success of CATIPO is based on the fact that there has been an enourmous demand for this kind of decision support and that it has been developed in tight cooperation with future users. © 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.