Program Information
IROC-Houston's New Automated Process for Issuing Credentialing Letters
H Mehrens*, N Hernandez , B Lewis , T Nguyen , A Molineu , D Followill , UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX
Presentations
SU-I-GPD-J-35 (Sunday, July 30, 2017) 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM Room: Exhibit Hall
Purpose: To describe the new automated process for issuing IROC-Houston’s credentialing letters.
Methods: IROC-Houston issues credentialing letters for approximately 75 different NCI NCTN clinical trials. The process for credentialing begins with a Credentialing Status Inquiry (CSI) form, which is filled out by a site wanting to be credentialed for a specific protocol. IROC-Houston checks the requirements stated by the protocol and if all are met, the site is issued a credentialing letter. Utilizing Matlab, the new automation software does the above work in less than a second. It uses the site’s RTF number to retrieve relevant phantom, Facility Questionnaire, contact and benchmarks and IGRT credentialing information pertaining to protocol. The old timeframe from CSI receipt to letter generation allowed up to seven business days for the official letter to be sent.
Results: The purpose of the automated program is to organize information required to issue the letter and print out a template for the letter to help reduce overall time devoted to credentialing. The new process cuts the time down to two business days from the allowed 7 days and simplifies the format of the credentialing letter. In 2016, we received 2510 CSI Forms and issued 2148 credentialing letters. This new program has been utilized since 2/13/2017 to respond to 222 CSI forms and has issued 179 credentialing letters. The automated process of gathering information to check requirements and creating the credentialing letter is accomplished four times faster relative to the old method. Based on 2016 numbers, this could save approximately 750 person-hours per year of processing CSI forms and generating letters.
Conclusion: With an increasing demand for credentialing, IROC Houston’s new automated system has significantly reduced the time required to process CSI forms and issue credentialing letters to a site.
Funding Support, Disclosures, and Conflict of Interest: This work was supported by NCI grant # CA180803.
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