Computer-Aided Reporting of Chest Radiographs: Efficient and Effective Screening in the Value-Based Imaging Era.

In the post-PACS era, mammography is unique in adopting specialized ergonomic interfaces to improve efficiency in a high volume setting. Chest radiography is also a high volume area of radiology. The authors hypothesize that applying a novel interface for chest radiography interpretation and reporting could create high productivity while maintaining quality. A custom version of the ClearCanvas open source software, EzRad, was created with a workflow re-designed specifically for tuberculosis screening chest radiographs, which utilized standardized computer generated reports. The preliminary reports from 881,792 studies evaluated by radiology residents over a nine-year period were analyzed for productivity as RVU/FTE and compared to the finalized reports from a subspecialty attending chest radiologist for accuracy. Radiology residents were able to produce 7480 RVU/FTE per year in screening chest radiography productivity when using a custom interface at a large academic medical center with a miss rate of 0.1%. Sensitivity was 77% and specificity was 99.9%. An ergonomic user interface allowed high productivity in interpretation of chest radiography for tuberculosis screening while maintaining quality.

Building blocks for a clinical imaging informatics environment.

Over the past 20 years, imaging informatics has been driven by the widespread adoption of radiology information and picture archiving and communication and speech recognition systems. These three clinical information systems are commonplace and are intuitive to most radiologists as they replicate familiar paper and film workflow. So what is next? There is a surge of innovation in imaging informatics around advanced workflow, search, electronic medical record aggregation, dashboarding, and analytics tools for quality measures (Nance et al., AJR Am J Roentgenol 200:1064-1070, 2013). The challenge lies in not having to rebuild the technological wheel for each of these new applications but instead attempt to share common components through open standards and modern development techniques. The next generation of applications will be built with moving parts that work together to satisfy advanced use cases without replicating databases and without requiring fragile, intense synchronization from clinical systems. The purpose of this paper is to identify building blocks that can position a practice to be able to quickly innovate when addressing clinical, educational, and research-related problems. This paper is the result of identifying common components in the construction of over two dozen clinical informatics projects developed at the University of Maryland Radiology Informatics Research Laboratory. The systems outlined are intended as a mere foundation rather than an exhaustive list of possible extensions.

Use of a wiki as a radiology departmental knowledge management system.

Information technology teams in health care are tasked with maintaining a variety of information systems with complex support requirements. In radiology, this includes picture archive and communication systems, radiology information systems, speech recognition systems, and other ancillary systems. Hospital information technology (IT) departments are required to provide 24 x 7 support for these mission-critical systems that directly support patient care in emergency and other critical care departments. The practical know-how to keep these systems operational and diagnose problems promptly is difficult to maintain around the clock. Specific details on infrequent failure modes or advanced troubleshooting strategies may reside with only a few senior staff members. Our goal was to reduce diagnosis and recovery times for issues with our mission-critical systems. We created a knowledge base for building and quickly disseminating technical expertise to our entire support staff. We used an open source, wiki-based, collaborative authoring system internally within our IT department to improve our ability to deliver a high level of service to our customers. In this paper, we describe our evaluation of the wiki and the ways in which we used it to organize our support knowledge. We found the wiki to be an effective tool for knowledge management and for improving our ability to provide mission-critical support for health care IT systems.

Informatics in radiology: automated Web-based graphical dashboard for radiology operational business intelligence.

Radiology departments today are faced with many challenges to improve operational efficiency, performance, and quality. Many organizations rely on antiquated, paper-based methods to review their historical performance and understand their operations. With increased workloads, geographically dispersed image acquisition and reading sites, and rapidly changing technologies, this approach is increasingly untenable. A Web-based dashboard was constructed to automate the extraction, processing, and display of indicators and thereby provide useful and current data for twice-monthly departmental operational meetings. The feasibility of extracting specific metrics from clinical information systems was evaluated as part of a longer-term effort to build a radiology business intelligence architecture. Operational data were extracted from clinical information systems and stored in a centralized data warehouse. Higher-level analytics were performed on the centralized data, a process that generated indicators in a dynamic Web-based graphical environment that proved valuable in discussion and root cause analysis. Results aggregated over a 24-month period since implementation suggest that this operational business intelligence reporting system has provided significant data for driving more effective management decisions to improve productivity, performance, and quality of service in the department.

A suggested classification guide for PACS client applications: the five degrees of thickness.

This article defines and describes the numerous types of "clients" for picture archiving and communication systems (PACS). A radiologist uses a client to view images stored in the system. Many PACS are available in the market, and each offers different methods by which a client can view images from the server. The terminology used to describe these different methods can cause confusion and lead to poor choice for those imaging team members who are given the task of purchasing, implementing, and supporting the PACS. We propose a classification of clients with respect to their impact on client work stations, an effect often referred to as the application's thickness. The thinner the client, the less effect it has on the hosting work station. In contrast, a thick client consumes the work station's resources and often prevents a work station from being used to effectively run anything other than the client application. Functionality and supportability are highlighted as key and interacting metrics in determining optimal correct PACS solutions. The importance of a clear understanding of the needs and requirements of all users as well as the client application is emphasized. This relationship between supportability and functionality becomes increasingly important as the industry shifts to enterprise information technology solutions.

Use of a thin-section archive and enterprise 3D software for long-term storage of thin-slice CT data sets.

Rapid advances are changing the technology and applications of multidetector computed tomography (CT) scanners. The major increase in data associated with this new technology, however, breaks most commercial picture archiving and communication system (PACS) architectures by preventing them from delivering data in real time to radiologists and outside clinicians. We proposed a phased model for 3D workflow, installed a thin-slice archive and measured thin-slice data storage over a period of 5 months. A mean of 1,869 CT studies were stored per month, with an average of 643 images per study and a mean total volume of 588 GB/month. We also surveyed 48 radiologists to determine diagnostic use, impressions of thin-slice value, and requirements for retention times. The majority of radiologists thought thin slice was helpful for diagnosis and regularly used the application. Permanent storage of thin slice CT is likely to become best practice and a mission-critical pursuit for the health care enterprise.