Dear Healthcare IT Insider,
The communication of critical results is a hot topic in both medicine and radiology. But how well do critical results communication systems work?
Very well, according to Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. Using internally developed software built around concepts such as a liberal definition of critical result, an easy ability to select studies for critical results, and a defined workflow for telephoning results, the institution communicates critical results in an average of just over 10 minutes.
Dr. Alexander Towbin shared Cincinnati Children's experience with the system at the recent Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) 2013 annual meeting in Grapevine, TX.
Click here to access our coverage in this month's Healthcare IT Insider Exclusive, which you have access to before our regular members.
In other news from SIIM 2013 in your Healthcare IT Digital Community, researchers from the Cleveland Clinic have deployed open-source software to enable searching of similar radiology cases during the image interpretation process. Find out how they did it by clicking here.
The need for imaging and IT professionals to learn more about HL7 was a point of emphasis at SIIM 2013. But how much do they need to know about the standard? Consultant Herman Oosterwijk provides a useful primer here, and also discusses the HL7's Clinical Document Architecture here.
Also, read up on how clinical validation of SIIM's Workflow Initiative in Medicine (SWIM) project went, and how a software tool can help radiology residents track changes made by attending radiologists to their preliminary reports.
Other healthcare IT articles from SIIM include how computerized physician order entry can improve the entry of scanner protocols that carry out imaging studies. Also, Dr. Bradley Erickson made the case that the imaging informatics community must work together to innovate, and then translate imaging IT advances into practice.
Informatics topics were also featured during a session at the recent International Symposium on Multidetector-Row CT in Washington, DC. For example, Dr. Eliot Siegel discussed how imaging informatics can help bring into clinical practice the scientific advances that have been made in improving CT image quality and controlling radiation dose. Our coverage can be found here.
Also, electronic health records were found to slow the growth of outpatient care costs, thanks in large part to reductions in ambulatory radiology spending.
Do you have an idea for a healthcare IT topic you'd like to see covered? Please feel free to drop me a line.
