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2010 NATIONAL HEALTHCARE SUMMIT

See details of the ABRF's 2009 summit:
Medical Imaging: Addressing Overutilization in the Era of Healthcare Reform


Improving Patient Care through e-Communication in Imaging

Summary of the American Board of Radiology Foundation
2010 National Summit Meeting

In collaboration with the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) and the American Board of Radiology (ABR), the American Board of Radiology Foundation (ABRF) sponsored a national multidisciplinary summit meeting, Improving Patient Care through e-communication in Imaging. The Summit was held August 5-6, 2010, in Bethesda, Maryland. A total of 77 participants from 47 organizations were in attendance.

The meeting was chaired by William R. Hendee, PhD, chairman of the American Board of Radiology Foundation Board of Directors. The Summit was composed of physician, provider, payer, and consumer organizations joined to determine the causes for suboptimal communication in the medical imaging arena. Factors that currently limit communications among physicians, patients, healthcare institutions, and others regarding imaging procedures were addressed:

  • Lack of technical knowledge regarding new communication technologies
  • Limited availability of communication platforms to meet current and future needs
  • Limited time for inter-physician and physician-patient communication
  • Apprehension over sharing patient data due to HIPAA concerns
  • Bureaucratic red tape and complexity of merging different communication systems

Participants identified some of the ways these forces can be controlled and changed through a collaborative national effort. The following solutions were identified:

  • Instituting e-health services for patients, including online appointments, web messaging with physicians and staff, access to lab and radiology reports, prescription refills, reminders, and "information therapy"
  • Streamlining clinic processes by use of RFID (radio frequency identification) to identify everyone's location in real time
  • Moving care into the home through commoditization of communication and information technology
  • Using new technology such as social media, text messaging, Webex meetings, telemedicine linked to smart phones, and artificial intelligence
  • Integrating RIS (radiology information system) and PACS (picture archiving and communication) transcription of voice recognition into patient identification
  • Creating a national repository of cumulative radiation dose (currently being discussed by ACR and RSNA)
  • Facilitating movement of images from one institution to another (RSNA has contracted with NIBIB on this project)
  • Flagging subcritical findings automatically and adding them to a database for communication with primary care physicians
  • Utilizing dashboard pages with a series of graphs to show status in the clinic or department at any one moment in time
  • Optimizing IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) to merge exams and reports, processed images, context for patients, exam and event statuses, and radiation exposures
  • Implementing structured reporting and lexicons, such as BIRADS from ACR and RadLex from RSNA
  • Maximizing protocols for high-dose CT procedures (medical physicists)
  • Standardizing and sharing EHR (electronic health records) for patient information (including radiation oncology and clinical trial support)
  • Instituting comparative effectiveness research
  • Capturing patterns-of-care radiation oncology data through real time registries (to complement U.S. Cancer Registry Program)
  • Certifying and adopting EHR products (Health and Human Services)
  • Incentivizing the "meaningful use" of healthcare information technology (HIT) for capturing and sharing of data, radiology order entry, clinical decision support, and improvement of outcomes
  • Increasing the usability of wide area image sharing for patients to transmit information and images to authorized providers and national registries

In summary, participants concluded that no single individual, department, or entity can solve communications problems for radiology; a team approach is absolutely essential. This is a crucial time for decision-making, and standardization of processes is a key element. To optimize the system, advances of the past must be linked with future innovations. Noninterpretive skills such as communication, service, professionalism, and ethics must be recognized at the same level of importance as other medical knowledge. Technical advances are moving us from a provider-centric world to a patient-centric world. We must recognize, understand, and embrace the changes.

The following are Summit presentations available for download:

*Please note that these are very large files. Download time might be several minutes for users with slower connections.

A panel of young professionals also spoke on "The Relevance of e-Communication in Healthcare." They included Casey Chollet, MD, Chief Resident, Loyola University; David Naeger, MD, Clinical Fellow, Cardiac and Pulmonary Imaging and Nuclear Medicine, University of California, San Francisco; and Omar Wooten, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of California, Davis.
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