The general consensus is that radiologist access to meaningful patient information improves diagnostic accuracy and report quality, according to presenter Dr. Pritesh Patel from the University of Chicago.
"Radiologists typically rely on the reason for exam provided by the referring physician, which we have previously documented to be frequently sparse, especially when computerized order entry (CPOE) is used," Patel told AuntMinnie.com. "Our goal was to study the effect of lack of meaningful [reason for exam] on report quality, in particular on hedging language, in a large retrospective report corpus."
After retrospectively analyzing more than 44,000 anonymized reports, the researchers found that the lack of a meaningful reason for an exam order increased the prevalence of hedging language in radiology reports.
"This may be addressed by novel software solutions that can utilize the electronic medical record to synthesize patient history and also give data to referring clinicians to give as good a patient history as possible when ordering," Patel said.
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