Congress:
EuroSafe Imaging 2017
Keywords:
CAD, eHealth, Action 13 - Stakeholder engagement and collaboration, Action 10 - Improved communication and collaboration of health professionals in radiation protection, Workforce
DOI:
10.1594/esi2017/ESI-0060
Conclusion and Recommendations
With the structured indication and the structured investigation schemes as parts of a holistic structured reporting template the requirements of the BSS Directive may be brought to the point of care in clinical radiology.
Optimization as one of the important principles of radiation protection is defined in the BSS Directive as to “… be consistent with the medical purpose of the exposure” and this term is used in the context of clinical responsibility and of clinical evaluation of the outcome [1].
Therefore it may be concluded,
that in a broader sense all steps of the imaging process should be optimized to keep the patient dose as low as reasonably achievable.
Besides the effects of the BSS Directive,
radiology reporting is influenced by other relevant concepts,
especially those of diagnostic reasoning,
of health economy,
and of P4 medicine [14,
15].
With all these new developments a new safety culture in imaging may be expected.
For the implementation in clinical practice,
structured reporting plays an important role and should be designed in a way that reflects the underlying streamlined workflow in a radiology institute.
Working with dropdown lists in a simply accessible software is suitable to implement all these requirements and to bring them to the clinical point-of-care.
Structured reports have to be sectioned and sub-sectioned,
the key-elements need attributes,
and the terms used in the reports should be communicated by all professionals and by the patients involved in the process.
Such a structured organisation may be a suitable knowledge base for clinical decision support systems.
The limitations of this pilot study are that many questions related to proper IT solutions and data protection,
to medical error management and quality assurance,
to the prevention of over- and underutilization of imaging and other aspects of health economy,
and to others have still to be solved.
In conclusion,
it could be shown that a structured reporting template is a feasible instrument for implementing the requirements of the BSS Directive and for combining it with other modern concepts of diagnostic imaging.
It may be used for national uptake processes as part of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) and for radiological institutes to fulfil the requirements of the BSS Directive.