A health intelligence software platform that automates retrieval of information from electronic health records (EHRs) for radiologists can significantly decrease the interpretation time required for abdominal MRI studies, according to research published online March 30 in the Journal of the American College of Radiology.
A group of clinicians and software developers at Massachusetts General Hospital developed a platform called Queriable Patient Inference Dossier (QPID), which can be programmed to automate retrieval of patient history information for imaging from EHR software.
The software can be programmed with search queries based on a clinical concept, such as whether a patient has a history of cancer. Answers to these types of clinical questions can then be integrated into a clinician-driven dashboard tailored to the needs of the specialist, according to the team led by Dr. Arun Krishnaraj, now at the University of Virginia.
In testing on 48 abdominal MRI studies, QPID was found to reduce reading times for abdominal MRI studies by 19%.
"Advanced EHR intelligence platforms, such as QPID, have the potential to improve the efficiency of report generation and likely the safety and value of imaging services," the authors wrote. "Integrating contextual information, contained in varied databases, to augment image interpretation will be critical to maintain value-added benefits of imaging experts."
