by
Joanna Padovano, Reporter | October 05, 2011
From the October 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
TrueBeam, Varian Medical System’s most recently released radiation therapy system, was introduced in April 2010 and it is currently their best-seller. “This has been our biggest selling new machine ever, with more sales in the first year than we’ve seen with previous new product introductions,” says Meryl Ginsberg, the company’s director of public relations.
Image courtesy of Accuray
Within the next year or so, Varian will introduce a software platform that integrates Varian’s treatment planning software and oncology information management systems. “They are becoming part of a single clinical management system that marries up the two so that people don’t need to know which system to access in order to complete a task,” says Ginsberg, who mentions that the product, ARIA version 11, will be featured at ASTRO’s annual meeting in October 2011.
Improving safety
Maintaining safe equipment should always be the number-one priority for radiation therapy equipment manufacturers.
Goldwein mentions that Elekta has been reevaluating their safety-related activities after a New York Times article detailed the rare but fatal mishaps that can occur during radiation therapy. “From within our software, we are incorporating more and more interlocks,” which he explains is “a method to prevent an unsafe condition from existing, or from being implemented by means of some sort of either hardware or software switch that disallows the treatment from being delivered, or whatever the activity is that could be unsafe from happening.”
Accuray has been “continuing to make strives from a patient-safety point of view,” says Dawood. “Our devices are very unique in that they’re completely integrated devices. We use no third-party bolt-on components, so because of that, the imaging system is integrated within the actual delivery system, making the devices on the forefront of advancing patient safety.”
According to Ginsberg, careful post-market surveillance is among the processes that Varian uses for continual enhancement of product safety. “Our product specialists observe and interview early adopters, we survey customers, we monitor the professional communication channels . . . and we analyze all product improvement requests and complaints to spot any trends that reveal that there might be an issue,” she says. “Often we use this information to engineer product improvements. It’s a pretty robust process of continual improvement.”
