Remark: GTDS is a system for tumour documentation that is mainly used in German hospital cancer registries. So most of the information at this site is in German. Important concepts that have been published and presented on international congresses can be found here
In 1990, the so-called "Basisdokumentation für Tumorkranke", a basic data set for the registration of tumour diseases, was revised and developed towards a more clinical relevant standard. Since many of the documentation systems existing in the registries could not be adapted to this new data set, a new documentation system, the so-called "Gießener Tumordokumentationssystem" GTDS, has been developed supported by the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG). One main objective of this development was the integration of the tumour documentation into patient care. The documented data should be provided for clinical and outpatient care immediately after they have been entered into the system. Documentation should no longer be an often useless burden.
Thus GTDS offers functions for documentation and hospital cancer registry management as well as for the support of patient care. The latter comprises the automatic generation of diagnostic and treatment overviews and discharge letters using the documented data, scheduling functions for therapy plans and follow-up care, the generation of care plans for chemotherapy with calculations and recording of daily doses. Knowledge based functions using the Arden Syntax are integrated for data entry control, checking the eligibility of patients to clinical trials and for reminders. Planning functions are available for offering organisational support to care givers by defining required appointments and eligible medical procedures and by printing schedules. The registry can actively keep track of the patient's history. By this way the registry has become a central information source and resource for connected hospitals and physicians. Analysis functions for research are also available.
A standard interface accepting and serving HL7, BDT and ASCII messages is also integrated into the GTDS to import data that are already available in the hospital, like administrative, laboratory or radiology data or pathology reports. On the other hand, data can be exported to other systems, like population based registries, which require a subset of the data set used in the hospital cancer registries. This improves the quality of the input data of population based registries and reduces the cost of data gathering distinctly. Currently, more than 90 % of reports to the population based "Gemeinsames Krebsregister (GKR)" in the New States are transferred electronically from GTDS systems in hospital cancer registries.
GTDS is now in use more than 80 hospital cancer registries, mainly in the new states. The number of systems in the old states is continuously increasing. An evaluation made in 1999 showed that the functionalities provided in the GTDS are used intensively for improving patient care but in distinct ways within different registries. The overview report generated automatically from the stored data is used in nearly all registries. Some centres use the data mainly for supporting hospital care, others prefer to utilise the available functionality for the organisation of follow up care. But in any case GTDS has become the center of a network for improving patient care in oncology. Newer developments are now integrating the advantages of browser technology and in particular of XML in the GTDS.
Governmental support of GTDS is no longer necessary. Maintenance and further development is now financed by maintenance contracts with the users. GTDS is one of the very few examples of systems which were successfully implemented and accepted by the users after having been supported by governmental or research grants. It is a powerful tool, well accepted for improving patient care and also research in oncology.
It has been extended to calculate the certification criteria of the German Cancer Society for centers in oncology.
Since 2014 it is also in use under new legal regulations in clinical cancer registries on state level.