To implement structured reporting into their institution's clinical routine, the researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany developed a Web-based reporting engine that is capable of handling templates compliant with the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) Management of Radiology Report Templates (MRRT) standard. All of the reports are stored in a dedicated MySQL database, where tables are automatically generated according to the templates that are imported into the platform, according to presenter Dr. Daniel Pinto dos Santos.
When a report is generated, the inputs are stored in the corresponding table, which makes it easy to compute items such as epidemiological statistics, he said. Statistics are updated accordingly whenever a report is added to the database.
"The implication of the study is just to prove that structured reporting can live up to the promises it seems to make and that it can be achieved today in a fully IHE-compatible way," he told AuntMinnie.com. "This could make retrospective studies as easy as a couple SQL statements to extract the statistics from a corresponding database."
As an example, the institution now has more than 500 reports of pulmonary embolism studies that also include D-dimer values. That's a number of patients comparable to some published retrospective studies, dos Santos said.
