Information technology resource management in radiation oncology

The ever-increasing data demands in a radiation oncology (RO) clinic require medical physicists to have a clearer understanding of information technology (IT) resource management issues. Clear lines of collaboration and communication among administrators, medical physicists, IT staff, equipment service engineers, and vendors need to be established. In order to develop a better understanding of the clinical needs and responsibilities of these various groups, an overview of the role of IT in RO is provided. This is followed by a list of IT-related tasks and a resource map. The skill set and knowledge required to implement these tasks are described for the various RO professionals. Finally, various models for assessing one's IT resource needs are described. The exposition of ideas in this white paper is intended to be broad, in order to raise the level of awareness of the RO community; the details behind these concepts will not be given here and are best left to future task group reports.