The Lymphoma Wizard is being developed to improve the capacity of clinical haematologists to make informed and timely decisions on the diagnosis and management of blood cancers.

It will do this as a software that will sit on the specialist’s desktop that will support standards based decision making and best practice approaches to the collection, reporting and analysis of data collection around blood cancers. While the project is focused in the first instance on lymphoma it is hoped that if successful it will be able to be extended to other blood cancers.

Blood cancers, such as lymphoma and leukaemia are a group of diseases with increasing in incidence in Australia. Lymphoma is now the fifth most common cancer in Australia and its incidence has doubled in the last 20 years with no known reason. For lymphoma patients, survival is dependent upon accurate staging of the disease and the immediate commencement of appropriate therapy. Clinical haematologists want improved accuracy and timeliness of information about the outcomes of the standards of the care they provide, based on the latest laboratory findings, while patients report they wish to be more involved in the decisions about the management of their care.

The Lymphoma Wizard is being installed on the desktop computers of private and public sector specialists caring for people with lymphoma. The Lymphoma Wizard will trial a method of adding treatment and disease staging information to electronic requests for laboratory investigation. These will be continually added to and form a part of the subsequent electronic health record for a patient, which is kept by their medical specialist with the appropriate security and confidentiality protection for patients and providers. The Lymphoma Wizard is initially being piloted in Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia.

Workshops of medical specialists and software engineers have identified the standards and criteria for staging and treatment of lymphoma, and how these can be described in a computable form. This information will be used by software engineers from Medical-Objects to build the system.