Radiology departments in specialized care settings face unique challenges accessing images quickly, but a new study in the Journal of Imaging Informatics may have roadmapped a way to improve the management of reports, particularly those that come from CT scans. [1]
The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City introduced an automatic assignment system (AAS) in its radiology department in an effort to improve efficiency and report turnaround times. The team, led by Wyanne Law, MD, conducted a retrospective study on its impact, looking closely at how the system improved radiology workflows.
For their research, Law and her team analyzed 232,022 CT examinations for 12 months after the AAS was deployed, comparing the results with a historical control period. Despite seeing a 9% increase in CT volume post-AAS, the availability of radiologists to read reports improved by 8%. Further, the cancer center saw a significant decrease in radiology report requests marked as urgent, reducing the need to react to those by 60%. During peak days where the radiology department was particularly busy, the number of urgent requests still dropped by 52.2%.
Additionally, the mean turnaround time for reporting was also reduced, likely as a result of the AAS at decreasing workflow interruptions, the authors noted. Despite the improvements in overall efficiency, they were unable to find any measurable improvement to the patient experience.
“In our exploratory analysis, we did not find a significant reduction in the patient waiting time at the outpatient oncologic gynecology clinic,” Law and the other authors wrote. “We attribute the lack of improvement to factors unrelated to imaging, such as waiting for bloodwork results and, for appointments later in the day, backlog of patients from earlier appointments. This data, however, was unfortunately not available to us for further analysis.”
The researchers added that all improvements were achieved without a significant change in the number of CT reports and patient cases being assigned to a radiologist.
The full study findings are available at the link below.
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