Incorporating digital photos of patient faces with their x-ray images can decrease patient identification errors by fivefold, according to research presented this week at the American Roentgen Ray Society (ARRS) meeting in Washington, DC.
In a study by Dr. Srini Tridandapani and colleagues at Emory University, 10 radiologists were able to identify images matched with the wrong patient 64% of the time when interpreting pairs of radiographic images with photographs. Without photographs, the radiologists only caught approximately 13% of the errors.
The radiologists participating in the study interpreted 20 pairs of images with and without photographs. Two to four mismatched pairs were included in each set of 20 images.
In a surprising finding, interpretation time declined when photographs were added to the images. Although the researchers aren't sure why this happened, they speculated it could be because photographs provided clinical clues that assisted the radiologist in making the diagnosis.
In the study, the radiologists did not know they could use photographs as a means to identify mismatched x-ray images, and some indicated they purposely ignored the photographs because they thought the study was designed to determine if a photograph would distract them, Tridandapani said in a statement.
The researchers then conducted a second study with five radiologists, who were instructed to use the photographs. The error detection rate in this study was 94%, he said.
