What if radiologists could significantly reduce their reporting time while increasing the value of the report?

97%  of radiology departments are unable to meet reporting requirements¹

Ever since Wilhelm Röntgen discovered the X-ray 125 years ago, radiology reports have not fundamentally changed in format, relying on a text-based narrative to convey findings to physicians and patients.² What has changed are the expectations for radiologists to provide reports within rapid turnaround times to give referring clinicians the data they need, when they need it, at the point of care.

This challenge is complicated by the difficulty of evaluating data that may live in various locations, from various modalities,  acquired at various levels of image quality, as well as the need to use various advanced visualization solutions on separate workstation solutions to address complex cases. Radiology managers are challenged by the department-wide need to be sure that reports are read accurately, and that clinicians and other radiologists are consulted as appropriate. This is a lot to ask of an old-style radiology report.

The radiologist’s time is at a premium

Given healthcare’s insatiable demand for diagnostic imaging and a growing global shortage of imaging professionals, radiologists will be under greater pressure to produce timely reports with better data and greater clinical insight. Supporting them is critical to helping clinical teams move patients efficiently along the care pathway.

Better insights communication and more value to referring physicians

Fortunately, radiology reporting is moving into the hyperlinked, voice-activated, multimedia world that already enables us in our everyday lives. A more content-rich report, easily created, allows radiologists to share the data and analysis behind image interpretation, providing greater value to referring physicians.

Interactive multimedia reporting allows radiologists to embed key images for side-by-side comparison, with hyperlinks to view compared prior studies in the enterprise viewer, as well as tables and graphs to clearly track the progress of findings over time.

With voice dictation, a clinician can simply use commands such as “add key images” to embed images into the report. Adding quantitative data from advanced post-processing is easy, too. There’s no need to navigate between different tabs, places in the menu, or within the application. Native interactive multimedia reporting and advanced visualization applications – as part of a single unified workspace – eliminate the need for a separate reporting solution.

Radiology leaders who have adopted multimedia reporting claim, jokingly, that their clinical colleagues won’t let them ever go back to “old-school” reports. Referring clinicians can now click on the embedded images for closer inspection without having to leave the report. This can be a big time-saver. One study showed that multimedia reports can save oncologists 8.9 minutes in assessing a patient’s tumor burden compared to text-only reports.³