Timely communication can play a key role in patient safety, quality of care and optimal outcomes; by supporting timely clinical follow-up and appropriate treatment. Today, it is also very often measured by report turnaround times.
But what happens when the availability of the report is not the limiting factor for care? When the issue is the time lapse before your colleague takes action, based on your report? When what’s important is the ‘action time’?
Expect the unexpected…
Let’s look at such a case: your patient comes in for a routine chest exam, during which you unexpectedly discover an asymptomatic tumor. Quick diagnosis and treatment are important for proving timely care.
You can expedite the report turnaround, and send it on to the ordering physician. But how can you be sure
1) that he will see the report right away;
2) that he will immediately recognize the severity of the results; and
3) that he will understand and act on your recommendations?
With Enterprise Imaging, you have tools to make sure your report is speedily received, and important results and recommendations are visible.
Flying a red flag
To start with, you want to make sure none of the crucial information is missed or ‘lost’ amongst the details. Within the report, you can structure results to include a specific section for your findings and recommendations, giving them the prominence they need.
You also can flag your results and follow-up recommendations based on urgency. For example, ‘critical’, when action is needed ASAP; ‘urgent’, requiring action within e.g. 24 hours; or ‘significant-unexpected’, when results are significant for the patient and unexpected for the referrer.
Change the channel
Once it’s ready, Enterprise Imaging can transmit the report to the ordering physician via several different communication channels. So even if he is not at his desk, the EI Mobility app can send a notification that the report is ready to his smartphone, whether by chat message, by email or by text. The distribution workflow for your results notifications can be customized based on the severity you assign to the ‘results to read’ message.
For very urgent cases, a deadline can be specified: perhaps the physician has already gone off duty, and the results remain ‘unread’ for a specified period of time. The system can then re-route the action task to the next person on call. So instead of the ordering physician ‘chasing’ the message, the results ‘chase’ an appropriate receiver, until they are read and acted upon.
With these tools and more, Enterprise Imaging helps you meet the complex communication challenges for diagnostic radiology, by helping you to convey findings, type of result, degree of urgency and recommendations in a way that not only ensures they are received, but that they are acted upon.
Visit us at ECR 2019 to find out more.
