Radiologists in their teaching hospital had been complaining that they didn't have enough stations to sign off on reports while reviewing cases with trainees, said presenter Raja Gali, radiology IT administrator at Thomas Jefferson University.
"Since the trainees are logged on to the reading station to make the changes, it's cumbersome for the attending radiologist to have them log off after every report to sign off on that report," Gali said. "Our last version of PowerScribe 5.0 [speech recognition software] did not have the mobile app feature that lets the user make edits or sign off a report using their mobile phones or tablets."
After adopting the PowerScribe 360 Mobile Radiologist (Nuance Communications) mobile app for their institution's Centricity RIS (GE Healthcare), the researchers wanted to see if it affected report turnaround time.
"Also, we had benchmarks on report turnaround time based on patient type (emergency, inpatient, and outpatient), which we were meeting with very few exceptions," he said. "We wanted to see if there was any change on those outliers [from implementing the mobile app]."
While an initial analysis showed the mobile application was not as widely used as anticipated, the group also found that report turnaround time dropped significantly as of 30 days after implementation.
"Our turnaround time did go down, but that was irrespective of a user using the mobile app or not," he said. "Those who used it more than others used it only to sign off on about a fraction of their total volume, so I cannot say for sure that the mobile app was the reason for the improvement in their turnaround times."
Check out this talk for all of the details.
