Scott W Hadley, PhD

As a clinical physicist Dr. Hadley has brought a scientific perspective to patient safety in radiation oncology. From his vantage point he is able to see what the clinical needs are and how rigorous analysis and sensible application can have a positive impact on both patient safety and clinical operations. For example, in his work on safety limits as applied to radiation therapy treatment deliveries he used data gathered from historic radiotherapy treatments and rigorous statistical analysis to dial in operating limits that increased the operators' trust in the safety system. Later in Dr. Hadley's work on the data integrity of radiotherapy information systems, patient safety was greatly enhanced by innovating a method to vary radiotherapy plan information when a software system is migrated from one platform to another. Without this new method one could never be 100% sure that no data were corrupted. These early efforts in using computers to increase patient safety led to a new paradigm in radiotherapy where critical quality assurance checks and patient safety analysis were triggered automatically using an event driven workflow. This essentially inverted the data chase in radiotherapy so that the critical safety checks were performed as soon as possible, and the results were presented to the user for review as soon they were complete. This reduced lead times from hours to seconds and eliminated human error using automation.