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R. D'Amuse



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    O19 - Support and Palliation I (ID 138)

    • Event: WCLC 2013
    • Type: Oral Abstract Session
    • Track: Nurses
    • Presentations: 1
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      O19.01 - Health Informatics and Oncology in Global Health: A Pilot Program in Affordable Network technologies in Haiti (ID 1478)

      10:30 - 12:00  |  Author(s): R. D'Amuse

      • Abstract
      • Presentation
      • Slides

      Background
      A projected 75% increase in cancer deaths are expected in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC) by 2020. As successful battles against infectious disease and malnutrition deaths are waged, the demands on poor healthcare systems to create affordable oncology infrastructure will become ever more acute. Effective and efficient collaborative technologies that permit presentation of cases from resource limited environments to healthcare professionals in the developed world can aid in decision making, treatment planning and education. In this trial a novel clinical platform was launched in Haiti and we present a case of a chest wall malignancy demonstrating the platform's capacity for collaboration and clinical management between a resource limited community hospital in Haiti and Academic Medical Centers in the United States.

      Methods
      An Extensible Markup Language (XML) based system was built according to specifications of clinicians in the Thoracic Oncology Service of University of California San Francisco Medical Center. In a community hospital in Saint Marc, Haiti 30 cases involving a variety of clinical conditions across adult and pediatric oncology and traumatic disease were presented to Academic Medical Center volunteer physicians in the United States on a web-based asynchronous clinical collaboration system. The infrastructure required transfer over a wireless network in Haiti followed by secure transmission via internet to the dedicated servers in the United States.

      Results
      Case 1: A 32 year old Haitian Male presented to the Hopital Saint Nicholas in Saint Marc, Haiti with posterior chest and shoulder pain and a chest wall mass extending to the scapula. X-rays revealed a destructive lesion of the chest wall without frank mass within the pulmonary parenchyma. An open biopsy was performed and the specimen transferred for pathologic evaluation at The University of California San Francisco. Clinicians from 3 medical centers in the US came to a consensus opinion regarding diagnosis (unicentric plasmacytoma of chest wall) and treatment strategy within 3 days. Digital images of Immunohistochemical staining, X-rays uploaded to the collaboration platform via a smartphone photo app and literature reviews of the case were transmitted to Haitian physicians including a treatment plan recommendations . 29 additional patients have been offered evaluation in a web based environment and will be discussed.

      Conclusion
      Oncology cases in the developing world are increasingly prominent in light of advances in combating infectious disease and poverty related malnutrition. However resource limited environments may not have access to clinical decision tools, diagnostic measures or treatments commonplace in fully developed countries. Inexpensive collaborative technologic tools as demonstrated in this pilot can serve as a bridge between developed and developing countries in combination with the will to improve health among the planet's poorest communities

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