From paper to electronic: One hospital's success story

With a manual process in place to record measurements into a patient’s report, the productivity of Florida Hospital’s team of radiologists was being negatively impacted. Some 120,000 ultrasounds are performed annually at the facility, so to efficiently manage patient’s report, the hospital set out to find the best solution.

After weighing their options, Florida Hospital selected ModLink DICOM Structured Report (SR) system, a vendor and modality neutral translation engine that accepts DICOM SRs and HL7 messages, translates and normalizes values per department specifications and forwards the translated values to a voice recognition system.

“Now we have the metrics to prove we have eliminated reporting errors, which definitely impacts patient safety and changes patient management,” said Joe Bancroft, MD, president of Radiology Specialists of Florida in a Lexmark release. “The 19 to 28 percent improved physician reading time has made a positive impact on our practice. All of this is directly attributed to the Lexmark ModLink and PowerScribe 360 data integration.”

Since the switch, Florida Hospital has seen improvements in not just the elimination of ultrasound measurement reporting errors, but with radiologist read times and a quick adoption to the imaging enterprise.

“Once our first ultrasound department was prepared and the templates were built, the other site deployments were very straightforward and easy to implement. The expansion to our other imaging sites was handled internally by our team,” said Steve Gonzalez, PACS administrator, in a statement. “We are planning on expanding the deployment to other modalities such as dual energy absorptiometry (DXA), enhanced CT, nuclear medicine and others as soon as possible.”