National quality initiatives and efforts from radiology societies, such as the American College of Radiology's Imaging 3.0 initiative, serve as a call to the specialty to get directly involved with patient care, according to presenter Dr. Travis Browning.
"I was interested in how the electronic medical record could be leveraged at all points in the care stream -- from the initiation of the order all the way to the end point of results -- with the goal of standardizing processes and improving care," Browning told AuntMinnie.com.
Through an initiative to leverage features in their EMR from Epic Systems, the researchers were able to highlight patients with risk factors such as contrast allergies and renal insufficiency at multiple checkpoints in the process. This helped to alert all caregivers to risk, institute standardized prophylaxis measures, track utilization of such measures, and support technologist workflow.
"In many instances, delivering the right information to the right person at the right time or empowering support personnel to follow approved care protocols can avoid errors, avoid delays, and streamline overall processes," Browning said. "In addition, such systems can be built to survive external scrutiny and auditing."
There are elements that can be improved, supported, and standardized in every step of a process, he said.
"Our interventions have aided ordering providers, protocoling radiologists, and radiology nursing and technologist workflows," Browning noted.
A multilayer system for safety can be built by looking at every process step.
"Try to make it easy for each person in the process to do the right thing at the right time," he added.
