A New Study: Improving Patient Safety with SGRT

As surface-guided radiation therapy (SGRT) gains traction as an essential part of radiation therapy, it is becoming more than merely a technology for patient positioning. The clinical role of SGRT is well appreciated for improving the accuracy of patient positioning and treatment monitoring as well as efficiency gains. However, little information had been published on the potential for SGRT to prevent incidents and/or adverse events.

In the study “The role of surface-guided radiation therapy for improving patient safety” by Al-Hallaq et al., published in the October 2021 edition of Radiotherapy and Oncology (Volume 163), emerging data found that SGRT could improve safety and treatment quality by preventing errors in its capacity as an independent system in the treatment room.

Based on data from three different incident learning centers (ILS), 21% of the events (defined as unwanted or unexpected changes from a normal system behavior, which causes or has the potential to cause an adverse effect to persons or equipment) that occurred during pre-treatment review/verification and treatment stages were likely preventable with the use of SGRT. The most common of these preventable events were wrong isocenter (43%) and incorrect accessories for immobilization (34%). In addition, many of the events that could’ve been mitigated using SGRT were events with higher severity.

“SGRT provides the potential to reduce treatment-related errors which could affect patient outcomes, especially within the realm of hypo-fractionated treatments.”

– Juergen Meyer, University of Washington Medical Center and Department of Radiation Oncology, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, Seattle, WA, USA, and senior author for the study.

The article concludes that, as the use of SGRT evolves, it’s becoming more than patient positioning technology—SGRT also is a valuable tool with the potential to increase patient safety and treatment quality in radiotherapy.

C-RAD offers a full range of SGRT solutions, along with robust training, implementation and vendor integration to help ensure the best possible treatment outcome while maximizing efficiency for the treatment team.

Learn more here: https://crad.dpc.uk.com/clinical-usage/sigrt/