Called SingleView, the vendor-agnostic imaging interoperability platform has linked UPMC's 12 separate PACS installations and created a unified view of all of patient's prior studies and reports from all hospitals in the UPMC federation, according to presenter Dr. Rasu Shrestha, medical director of digital imaging informatics.
After the launch of SingleView, the institution discovered that an average of 23.1% of patient studies were found to have relevant prior exams stored in vaults other than the primary vault, according to the researchers. In addition, the group found that radiologists and clinicians were literally unaware of the existence or location of these prior studies and reports prior to SingleView.
"The application has been widely adopted across all of our hospitals as it has proven to directly save radiologists' (and clinicians') time, increase clinical efficiency and accuracy, decrease inappropriate/unnecessary repeat scans, and decrease claims denials (hence save costs)," according to Shrestha.
