From the November 2021 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

The culture and tradition of reporting in radiology has also created barriers to broader structured reporting adoption — with radiologists utilising free-form text reports for decades, whether that be dictated by technology or by an administrator. This method has allowed radiologists to incorporate their personal touch and flare into their work. Structured reporting takes this away from radiologists with templates and pre-determined sentence structure or drop-down menus, leading to a battle of “reporting culture” versus structured reporting tools.

Vendors recognise this culture and have begun embedding technology such as voice commands and NLP (natural language processing). This technology reduces the number of clicks required by the radiologist, allowing radiologists to continue dictating the report findings, whilst the software codifies the language used to match the standard terminology created in the structured reporting tool. This minimises disruption or the creation of “extra work” for the radiologist, but requires quite advanced and refined competency of the software to successfully implement across the breadth of radiology reporting complexity.


The integration of structured reporting
Depending on the region, the route to market for structured reporting differs. For example, in Western Europe structured reporting is a feature function of a RIS, PACS or enterprise imaging (EI) contract. However, in the U.S., reporting is sold either as a module of the EMR or a module of PACS / EI deals. Increasingly we’re seeing the reporting component transfer to PACS / EI deals as the more basic EMR-based reporting tools are unable to meet the radiologists need.

Despite the modular structure of procurement today, and with many imaging IT vendors fulfilling this capability through third party partnerships, direct integration of structured reporting into the diagnostic workflow is required to maximise adoption and minimise the disruption to radiologists.
To maximise the report quality, structured reporting tools cannot work in isolation and instead need to centrally connected within enterprise imaging system deployment. As seen in Fig.2, we expect a two phased approach to structured reporting integration; primarily offering direct integration into the diagnostic workflow (PACS in the US), with data from the EMR available to supplement reading and reporting, then evolving to exchange quantifiable findings from image analysis tools such as AI and AV.

November 2021 Magazine

Read more stories from the November 2021 issue

Health IT Homepage