Newspress

The new care pathway for advanced pelvic cancer encourages knowledge transfer and multidisciplinary care.

GE Healthcare and Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, have established a partnership to improve the efficiency of the care pathway for pelvic cancer patients and reduce unwarranted clinical variation. GE Healthcare will be providing consultancy services, tools for healthcare analytics and a PET/CT imaging platform. The contract is signed for a period of fourteen years with an option to be extended by further six years.

The partnership will be supported by the healthcare data aggregation solution, Caradigm Intelligence Platform (CIP) from Caradigm, which allows the hospital to combine data (including clinical patient data, financial and operational data) from different systems to support more sophisticated clinical decision support, analysis and prediction. Caradigm, a joint venture between GE Healthcare and Microsoft, is a global healthcare IT company focusing on Clinical Decision Support systems.

The use of PET/CT technology has a key role in the pelvic cancer patient pathway, from diagnosis, through to disease staging and treatment monitoring. GE Healthcare will be updating the imaging platform continuously with advanced technology throughout the whole contract period.

Karolinska University Hospital is one of Scandinavia's premier health facilities. Together with the world-respected Karolinska Institutet, they lead in medical breakthroughs in Sweden.

"Currently each care pathway for each pelvic cancer is being managed separately by specialties such as surgeons, urologists, gynecologists, but they all converge at various points in the pathway. This represents an important opportunity for knowledge transfer between specialties and delivering improvements in value-based healthcare across multiple care pathways", says Karl Blight, General Manager, GE Healthcare, Northern Europe. .

"This is a really exciting partnership for us, because now we can focus on the patients' overall journey and offer services and technologies that improve both clinical quality and cost-efficiency."

Pelvic cancer is an umbrella term for the cancers occurring in the pelvic region, including colorectal, ovarian, cervical and prostate cancer. Prostate cancer is currently the second most common cancer in men globally, and nearly two thirds of the cases are occurring in more developed regions of the world, because the practice of prostate specific antigen (PSA) testing and subsequent biopsy have become more widespread in these regions (1).

In Sweden, for example, prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer and during the past 35 years the number of diagnosed cases has increased significantly (2).

1. Globocan 2012: Estimated Cancer Incidence, Mortality and Prevalence Worldwide in 2012. http://globocan.iarc.fr
2. Cancerfonden: Cancer i siffror 2013. http://www.cancerfonden.se/Global/Dokument/omcancer/cancer_i_siffror/cancer_i_siffror_2013.pdf