HOUSTON, TX – M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the nation’s largest facility devoted exclusively to cancer research and care, is putting into play simulation technology used by financial institutions such as Merrill Lynch and retail outfits such as QVC, to meet its stated goal of making cancer history.

Simulation technology, developed by Los Angeles-based iRise, helped the cancer center’s tech team develop an online order-entry application built around order sets. Order sets, a grouping of physicians’ and nurses’ orders based on protocols, are at the core of cancer treatment.

M.D. Anderson vice president and CIO Lynn Vogel credits simulation for enabling the center to roll out the order-entry system and an accompanying lab order-entry application 50 percent faster than it would have been able to do otherwise.

Simulation translates into faster adoption and less training time because it can help better identify what the users require and thus reduce the need for rework.

“No single factor is responsible for more wasted effort, rework, or failed projects than inadequate requirements,” said Carl Zetie, vice president, Forrester Research.

 The technology developed by iRise made it possible for MD Anderson software developers and clinicians to test-drive the online ordering application before building it, to know that it would work well with the center’s electronic record system.

“Top-tier medical organizations such as M.D. Anderson Cancer Center are at the forefront of leveraging technology to solve some of life’s biggest problems,” said iRise CEO Emmet B. Keeffe III. “The faster and more effective that this kind of technology is delivered into production, the better the outcome is for cancer patients.”

Before building an online order application, the cancer center had developed its own electronic medical record system in-house. There is no commercially available product on the market today that could satisfy the cancer center’s needs, says Vogel. Any system would have required too much tailoring.

So the center started from scratch. The M.D. Anderson tech team – there are 70 people working on software development – worked with consulting firm Avanade to create a medical record system on an SOA, or service-oriented architecture platform. Avanade also worked with iRise to deploy the new applications at M.D. Anderson.

M.D. Anderson, which is part of the University of Texas, has been fighting cancer for 60 years. Its focus is on fusing genomics with the latest medicines to come up with customized treatment plans.

Cancer research, treatment and care focus on cellular dysfunction, said Vogel, “It’s all about genetic impressions,” in many ways. When you talk about personalized medicine, we are already doing it.”

“A physician can’t build his own order set,” explains Lynn Vogel, vice president and CIO of M.D. Anderson. “They are highly protocol driven.”

“Chemotherapy is a fairly toxic process,” Vogel says. “ We take precautions not to make mistakes.”