Dear RIS Insider,
The need and benefit of integrated radiology informatics were the subjects of various presentations at the Society for Computer Applications in Radiology (SCAR) annual meeting held in Orlando, FL, earlier this month.
A group from Canada's Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal in Quebec found that unifying RIS and PACS into a single interface provided gains in productivity and could improve patient care. Another presentation found that even partial use of speech recognition can yield significant reductions in report turnaround time, and a majority of clinicians enjoy a standardized, macro-driven report style.
In the same vein, a scientific session described the use of speech recognition applications to generate diagnostic radiology reports, which led to shorter reports when compared with analog dictation methods. Also the same week, radiology informatics was shown as a market advantage by a presenter at the Radiology Business Management Association (RBMA) radiology summit in Las Vegas, NV.
All in all, it's been a busy month for RIS. So busy in fact, that many facilities are taking a look at currently installed information technology (IT) and contemplating upgrades or adding a new component to the IT architecture. If your practice falls into this category, you'll want to take a look at this issue's RIS Insider feature story.
Healthcare informatics expert Janice Honeyman-Buck, Ph.D., from the University of Florida in Gainesville, offered her expertise on buying or upgrading a RIS at the recent SCAR conference. Deploying a new RIS or integrating an upgrade into an existing schema is a substantial undertaking; however, the project is manageable, if approached incrementally.
To learn more about the steps to take for a successful RIS implementation, click here. As a RIS Insider subscriber, you have access to this story before it's published for the rest of our AuntMinnie.com members at the end of the week.
Finally, if you have a comment or story to share about any aspects of RIS or healthcare IT, please get in touch with me at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you.
