It's an interesting time to be a radiologist. With health systems beginning to leverage all the technology they can to improve outcomes, radiologists are faced with a unique conundrum — being starved for information at key decision points while simultaneously wading through an overwhelming amount of extraneous information.
"This is affecting our productivity, and there are significant implications to healthcare systems because in many respects, radiologists are physicians' physicians," Lincoln Berland, MD, vice chairman for patient safety and quality improvement for University of Alabama Medicine in Birmingham, said at the Becker's Hospital Review 7th Annual Meeting in Chicago on April 28. "We serve the entire institution, and the efficient operation of the radiology department is key to an efficient medical operation overall."
Taking into account legislative changes, regulatory mandates, significant increases in patient volume and job security concerns for radiologists, practitioners are in need of a new model to help transform the way medical information is generated and managed, Dr. Berland said.
One tool radiologists at UAB utilize is the PowerShare Network, a cloud-based image-sharing system developed by Nuance that enables institutions to exchange data — not just images — bi-directionally.
"We are constantly getting patient referrals from outside institutions [that] have already performed CT scans," Dr. Berland said. "With this kind of network we're able to access information on the patient sometimes before they even arrive at UAB. We avoid re-scanning them and physicians know exactly what is going on before they see a patient. I think this type of system will prove to be tremendously effective as we deal with the consolidation of healthcare institutions."
But access to information isn't the end all, be all determinant of delivering quality care, especially for radiologists who have access to more data than they could ever consume, Dr. Berland said. Even today, there's a significant problem with identifying incidental findings in scans and recommending follow-ups when those findings are identified. To complicate matters further — and nearly all medical professionals face this problem — there's a troubling lag time between the publication of firm, evidence-based medical findings and practitioners adopting and implementing that knowledge.
"Computerized clinical decision support is being pursued at Nuance through a program called Clinical Guidance and within the AmericanCollege of Radiology through a program called ACR Assist," Dr. Berland said. "These two organizations are working together and other organizations will adopt this approach as well, and I think it really has the opportunity to provide tremendous value to medicine, not just radiology."
Computerized clinical decision support will be able to help radiologists analyze, manage and categorize critical results, Dr. Berland said. Preliminary reviews show that tools of this nature dramatically increase compliance with guidelines. And although these tools are still evolving, studies show radiologists want to use them, and they assist practitioners in overcoming challenges both discipline-specific and general to medicine today.