5 minute read
The Power of a Smart Worklist
Establishing a unified, intelligent, cross-enterprise workflow is vital to the success and growth of today’s medical imaging operation – whether hospital-based, imaging center, or independent radiology practice.
Why Intelligent Workflow?
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Removing the burden of deciding which study to read next increases the efficiency and productivity of an imaging organization’s most expensive and thinly-stretched resources – radiologists. Streamlining the process of locating relevant priors stored in other systems and using analytics to identify bottlenecks and implement solutions has the same benefit, while also increasing the quality of interpretation and reducing study backlog.
When radiologists only read exams for which they are credentialed, expensive overreads are eliminated. Establishing or enhancing multi-specialty 24×7 support grows the business. The possibilities are limitless once you open the door to the potential of intelligent, automated workflow.
Achieve Worklist Perfection
Intelerad’s Clario SmartWorklist™ automates the process of organizing and prioritizing the radiology reading worklist across the entire organization for optimum efficiency, boosting practice productivity as well as radiologist satisfaction. Powerful, built-in analytics provide data and tools to identify issues and implement solutions.
The powerful assignment engine in Clario SmartWorklist constantly evaluates and prioritizes cases in the queue in real time, accounting for variables such as radiologist subspecialty, credentials, workload, location and availability while simultaneously factoring in service-level agreement (SLA) requirements and STAT escalation needs. When cases require additional legwork from support staff, a parallel radiology support workflow allows cases to be moved back and forth between the reading worklist and a separate support worklist, with tracking and priority monitoring intact.
Organizations have complete control over the rules and criteria that govern case assignment. A smart, context-aware worklist means that the right study is always read by the right person at the right time, effecting a more balanced workload, higher quality, reduced turnaround time and higher radiologist satisfaction.
Identify and Address Issues with Integrated Analytics
More than a workflow manager, Clario SmartWorklist also provides an analytics platform with data and tools to measure practice productivity, value and quality. Performance dashboards track individual reading workload and progress. Integrated analytics are available to track and compare trends over time.
With a complete repository of workflow data, Clario SmartWorklist can be utilized to inform and identify productivity- and quality-related issues. With the built-in analytics features, business leaders or support teams can monitor and analyze a wide variety of metrics, such as:
Turnaround times for every segment in the exam lifecycle Turnaround times averaged by shift, reading location, radiologist, modality, site, and priority Time spent in dictation for each exam and aggregated by procedure code When and where exams are read By which radiologists exams are read (FT/PT/teleradiologist, subspecialty) Exam metrics (e.g. body part, subspecialty, RVU, work unit, SLA compliance, subspecialist) Operations requests for each exam, including time spent completing the request Results communicated for each exam, including time spent completing the communication Peer review error rate by time of day Individual or team productivity, historically or real-time via Productivity Gauge
With the ability to launch more than 50 different applications, Clario SmartWorklist can be used with a variety of legacy PACS, third-party diagnostic viewers and voice recognition systems.
Clario SmartWorklist can also be paired with Intelerad’s InteleOne® XE interoperability solution to seamlessly link users, from a single diagnostic viewer interface, to patient images and reports that are stored in any of the disparate systems found across an organization’s imaging ecosystem.
In combination, these two powerful Intelerad solutions aggregate reading tasks and relevant priors from any/all repositories across the enterprise into a single, actionable, intelligent worklist. The resulting unified, cross-enterprise workflow enhances productivity and resource utilization organization-wide. All authorized users, whether located at an imaging center or hospital, stationed at a remote facility, or working from home, can experience the same seamless, universal access to patient orders, images, and reports, across diverse patient identifier domains.
“We have been working with these technologies as a radiology group client as well as a reseller partner for multiple years. The combination of Intelerad’s workflow and diagnostic solutions with its intelligent worklist technology has allowed us and our clients to manage workflow more efficiently and intelligently. It’s been a key driver of our growth.”
Worth Saunders CEO of Greensboro Radiology and President of Canopy Partners
Outsmart the Worklist Management Problem
As if it weren’t smart enough, Intelerad’s intelligent workflow technology is AI-enabled and can be augmented with meaningful information through a vendor-neutral interface. This is critical as the role of artificial intelligence in medical imaging continues to evolve and become more established.
By modernizing the reading environment with Intelerad’s intelligent workflow technology, medical imaging operations create new opportunities for optimizing business problems, consolidating disparate technology systems, and attracting and retaining radiologists. They can literally outsmart the worklist management problem.
A Smarter Way to Read
In a radiology practice, resources are often scarce, always stretched thin, and too costly to waste. Yet valuable radiologist time is often consumed simply determining which study to read next. The pressure to keep turnaround time low and RVUs high, while maintaining high quality standards and fulfilling nonreading tasks, is unforgiving. The article Feeling the Burn on page 17 of this issue discusses the growing crisis of radiologist burnout in more detail.
The good news is that the increasing and unrelenting expectations put upon medical imaging organizations have inspired new technology solutions that can alleviate much of the strain. If maximizing productivity, increasing quality, and gaining important insight into business metrics for ongoing optimization are priorities for your business, investigate the power of a smart worklist.
Disparate Systems. One Worklist.
InteleOne® XE is a proven interoperability solution that unifies disparate medical imaging environments across multiple HIS, EMR, PACS and VNA systems.
Trusted by healthcare organizations of all sizes as well as the most complex healthcare networks and radiology practices, InteleOne XE connects patients, providers, and patient imaging data across the enterprise to enable community-wide, coordinated care.
Designed with security and scalability in mind, InteleOne XE offers flexible deployment strategies to help de-risk large-scale enterprise imaging projects by maximizing the use of legacy architecture while avoiding the need for data migrations.
› Achieve a single, unified workflow › Gain access to patients’ complete imaging history › Rapidly onboard new facilities and scale intelligently › Maximize resource utilization and efficiency
