“It is part of everyday practice for healthcare professionals to interrupt one another to communicate urgent information,” Watura and his colleagues wrote. “When an individual’s attention is diverted from (the) primary task, memory of the primary task begins to decay while processing the interrupting task. After returning to complete the remainder of the primary task, the likelihood of making an error is increased.”

One such app has been developed by Utah-based medical software company, Novarad. The app’s primary function is to accelerate the pace of healthcare by sending notifications directly from the RIS to the app installed on the physician’s phone – rather than by a telephone call that imaging reports and the findings they contain are ready for review. Contact by text message speeds the notification process and allows radiologists to quickly move on to the next report.


“I see it as a win-win for facilities, physicians and patients,” said Phyllis Redd, Imaging Director with Jackson Purchase Medical Center in Mayfield, Kentucky. “If a radiologist can push information out through a notification, instead of waiting on the phone for the referring physician and ending up five or six studies behind, then that’s faster, better patient care.”

The app, called AlertView, makes healthcare more efficient by eliminating unnecessary delays in the review of imaging reports. Text messages are sent to referring physicians, radiologists or cardiologists, alerting them that a report is ready for review. At virtually any place at any time, referrers can review a report with one click on the text message. This type of less invasive mobile communication and collaboration improves patient outcomes while minimizing disruptions to primary-care physicians and other hospital staff.

The app’s unique features include secure login with TouchID, a dynamic patient list that enables quick searches, extensive filtering (including modality and time filters), a convenient basic report view as well as an in-depth full report view, display of all key images in the study, and enhanced data security through deep linking.

“Security is a major component of the application,” said Harold Welch, vice president of Technical Solutions Worldwide with Novarad. “Medical information needs to be well protected yet readily available to authorized users, and that’s where the deep-linking comes in. The app is first protected by the mobile phone user’s passwords and fingerprints, and then protected further with a quick security question just prior to opening your first study. After that, the server recognizes that device as safe and the referring physician can access studies with a simple swipe and a fingerprint scan.”

In their five-day study, which evaluated 288 recorded calls and 23 returned forms, Dr. Watura and his team found that 92 percent of calls interrupted the reporting tasks of radiologists. More than half were considered appropriate by radiologists, however the rest of those interruptions were deemed inappropriate and included inquiries about study reports. With AlertView, there will be one fewer workflow impediment – that of notifying physicians that a report has been completed and is ready to be reviewed.

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