Twenty years ago, medicine and surgery rounds used to start in the reading room. Sitting in a dark room with a viewbox and an alternator, a senior radiologist greeted visiting clinical teams every day and reviewed their patients’ films.
With the advent of digitization and picture archive and communication system (PACS), the last 20 years saw a rapid evolution of radiology. We read studies faster than ever, and radiology workflow focused extensively on the interpretation of images and the associated diagnostic report.
Recently, there has been a revival patient-centered care and communication. Communication is the new radiology workflow.
I had the pleasure of writing about the importance of communication in radiology in a previous post. Just this month, a group at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center writes in American Journal of Roentgenology that despite our focus on critical value communication, the bulk (52%) of errors in radiology communication actually occur outside of results.
While most communication errors did not cause patient harm, 37.9% did affect patient care. The radiology value chain, of course, begins as early as the decision to image and extends well into appropriate follow-up imaging of identified lesions (Enzmann, Radiology 2012).
Maybe it’s time we as radiologists take ownership of the whole imaging process, from the decision to image all the way to follow-up.
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Cognitive computing, along with its technological brethren artificial intelligence and machine learning are wading into the provider space now. IT consultancy IDC, in fact, predicted that by 2018 nearly one-third of healthcare systems will be running cognitive analytics to extract real-world evidence from patient data that can inform personalized treatment.
The use of the phrase, “Artificial Intelligence” has exploded within the past few years as the theme of dozens of our most popular movies and television shows, magazines, books, and social media. This is despite the difficulty that many experts have in even defining the meaning of the term, “intelligence”, much less “artificial intelligence”.
