The uPlan® Advantage

Written By: David Westerly, PhD – co-founder, Atlantic Oncology, LLC

Remote medical dosimetry has become a mainstay for many radiation oncology departments as a result of workplace restrictions that were put in place to protect patients and providers during the covid-19 pandemic. Now as these workplace restrictions start to be lifted, many centers continue to utilize remote medical dosimetry as they have found it offers added benefits that were previously unrealized, including: providing a more flexible work environment for staff, as well as making it easier to recruit new medical  dosimetrists from across the country; this can be especially valuable for centers located in more rural destinations. That is not to say that remote dosimetry doesn’t present its own unique set of challenges. Remote medical dosimetry places new requirements on information technology infrastructure and security and also requires an effective means for communicating planning directives to medical dosimetrists that balances efficiency for the radiation oncologist and clarity of information for the dosimetrist. 

At Atlantic Oncology, we have developed uPlan® to achieve this balance. uPlan is a secure, web-based portal for requesting and managing remote treatment plans. Customized to each treatment facility, uPlan requests allow for specification of all relevant radiation prescription information, including treatment site, technique, and treatment modality, as well as practice-specific information, such as treatment machine, planning system, and calculation preferences. These parameters are defined for each site in a linked fashion so that only valid combinations of parameters can be specified in a uPlan request. This helps to reduce errors and improves efficiency in the planning process.

Example normal tissue dose constraint template for standard-fractionation head and neck treatment. Dose objectives and constraints are specified for each structure at the goal and acceptable level.

Once a uPlan request is initiated, it is forwarded to a medical dosimetrist assigned to your clinic. From there, progress of this planning task can be tracked via the uPlan dashboard as well as automated emails that alert the physician when a treatment plan is ready to review. Once a plan has been approved in the treatment planning system, it is accepted in uPlan and the medical dosimetrist completes any remaining QA and treatment preparation tasks. The process is easy and efficient and makes incorporating remote dosimetry into an existing clinical program a painless experience.

uPlan Request From

uPlan Request Form allows specification of all planning directives including treatment site, technique, modality, treatment machine, planning preferences and dosimetric constraints.

uPlan also incorporates fully customizable dosimetric constraint templates, allowing physicians to efficiently communicate detailed planning directives for a particular patient. These templates allow for specification of dose and dose/volume constraints for both target and normal tissue structures. Constraints can be specified at two different levels: the ideal planning goal as well as a less stringent but still acceptable level. These templates can also be used by the medical dosimetrists when reporting dose-volume statistics for a given plan; after the medical dosimetrist enters the achieved value, a simple color scale indicates if the plan dose meets the stated goal value, misses the goal value but is still acceptable, or if it falls below the acceptable level. These templates can be edited by the oncologist on-the-fly for a particular uPlan request, or they can be built and managed outside of a plan request using the template management portal.

uPlan Dashboard

uPlan dashboard allows for easy management of remote planning tasks that have been requested, are in progress, are ready for review, or have already been accepted. Invoicing of plans is performed automatically upon acceptance of a plan in the uPlan system.