Purpose: An online clinical information system, called Predictive Research Online System Prostate Cancer Tasks (PROSPeCT), was developed to enable users to query the Alberta Prostate Cancer Registry database hosted by the Alberta Prostate Cancer Research Initiative. To deliver high-quality patient treatment, prostate cancer clinicians and researchers require a user-friendly system that offers an easy and efficient way to obtain relevant and accurate information about patients from a robust and expanding database.
Methods: PROSPeCT was designed and implemented to make it easy for users to query the prostate cancer patient database by creating, saving, and reusing simple and complex definitions. We describe its intuitive nature by exemplifying the creation and use of a complex definition to identify a "high-risk" patient cohort.
Results: PROSPeCT was made to minimize user error and to maximize efficiency without requiring the user to have programming skills. Thus, it provides tools that allow both novice and expert users to easily identify patient cohorts, manage individual patient care, perform Kaplan Meier estimates, plot aggregate PSA views, compute PSA-doubling time, and visualize results.
Conclusion: This report provides an overview of PROSPeCT, a system that helps clinicians to identify appropriate patient treatments and researchers to develop prostate cancer hypotheses, with the overarching goal of improving the quality of life of patients with prostate cancer. We have made available the code for the PROSPeCT implementation at https://github.com/max-uhlich/e-PROSPeCT .