From the January/February 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
What the radiologist needs is a concise summary of the patient’s clinical information that is relevant to the specific radiology procedure about to be interpreted. This “clinical summary” should be automatically presented to the radiologist within a display window of the diagnostic workstation. The following two examples illustrate how this would contribute to the concept of VAR, by improving diagnosis and potentially sparing unnecessary exams or an invasive procedure (e.g. biopsy), potential future complications, etc.
A patient is referred to radiology for a CT of the abdomen to rule out liver cancer due to multiple hepatic masses visualized. Having access to the relevant lab results and vital signs would allow the radiologist to discover that the patient has fever and elevated WBC, which changes the diagnosis from cancer to infection and prevents unnecessary costs and discomfort of hospitalization and liver biopsy.
An ED patient with chest pain and a negative ECG is referred to radiology for a chest CT angiography to rule out aortic dissection because of family history of heart disease. Access to the relevant patient record data such as allergies, clinical notes and medications would reveal this patient has active UTI (Urinary Tract Infection) and was given a type of penicillin to treat this condition, although the patient is allergic to penicillin. Having an easy way to consume this data from within the diagnostic radiology application would allow the radiologist to provide a more accurate, high-quality diagnosis.
The ideal solution would be the automated mining of one or multiple EMRs and other potential data sources for predefined clinical information that is relevant. The final goal is to provide the radiologist with all the relevant clinical information, regardless of where it is stored, in an easy to consume manner. The searches are either performed when the study is first opened by the radiologist, or prior to opening the study (as far back as necessary based on the time required to execute the mining process and assemble the summary).
Ideally, the search criteria would be user-defined. This would be as simple as one set of search criteria per procedure type for the entire department, but eventually it should be possible for each radiologist to build their own set of search criteria. In the interest of efficiency, the clinical summary would ideally be limited to a single screen presentation with the option to allow the radiologist to dig deeper.
