Are referring physicians really listening?

Are referring physicians responding to recommendations for additional imaging procedures by radiologists? Precise answers to this age-old question -- made more difficult by the reduction of direct radiologist and physician communication that resulted from conversion to RIS and PACS -- can now be obtained through the implementation of electronic medical records.

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston deployed a search engine to first identify radiology reports, prepared over a six-week period, of outpatient chest radiographs that contained recommendations for a chest CT. A second search was conducted of 4,487 electronic medical records of the patients identified to determine if a chest CT exam had subsequently been performed.

Of the 84 patients out of 109 recommended who had the CT exam performed at the hospital, the research team analyzed each radiology report to determine the percentage identifying clinically significant findings. In this analysis, 38% yielded clinically significant findings, according to presenter Dr. Tarik Alkasab.