This project started as an initiative led by a radiology resident to improve the department's frequency and timeliness of reporting critical findings to referring clinicians, according to presenter Dr. Brian Trinh.
"Prior to the start of our project, there was an unspoken expectation that radiologists were to discuss all critical results with the ordering provider within one hour of diagnostic imaging completion," Trinh told AuntMinnie.com. "At baseline, our department was underperforming, only communicating and documenting less than half of our critical results within one hour."
The researchers designed a quality improvement project centered around the workflow of residents and fellows, and they implemented targeted interventions to improve their compliance rates.
"We found that by creating and distributing a concise list of findings to define what qualified as 'critical' and explicitly stating our expectations on how to report such findings, we could increase our compliance rate to 80%," Trinh said. "Furthermore, we decreased our average time for reporting critical findings from a baseline of 68 minutes down to 59 minutes by identifying specific clinical scenarios where we were slowest and, also, by creating a prepopulated template within our reports to help radiologists quickly document when a critical finding was communicated and who it was discussed with."
Journey over to Lakeside Center to get all the details from this poster presentation.
