UC Radiologists to Test Informatics Assist in CT Dose Reporting
Going into the weekend on which radiologists in California will be required to begin including CT dose metrics in their reports (deadline July 1, 2012), radiologists at medical centers associated with UC Davis, UCLA, and UCSF will be beta-testing the integration of Nuance’s PowerScribe 360 and the Radimetrics eXposure solution for dose reporting, reports Barbara Dumery, director of diagnostics solutions marketing, Nuance Healthcare.
The solution from Radimetrics collects a variety of dose metrics from the modality—including but not limited to CTDIvol and DLP—and then sends the information to the PowerScribe 360 database, which automatically pre-populates the appropriate template when a report is opened.
The integration is based on a web services API, so the amount of data that can be included in the feed is virtually limitless, Dumery explains, paving the way for the inclusion of additional biologically relevant information as CT dosimetry solutions evolve.
With the deadline for dose metric reporting in California just days away, getting the dose information into the report is expected to require the manual intervention of either technologists or radiologists.
“For customers who don’t have a solution like Radimetrics, there is the ability for technologists to manually enter the data into the template at the time of scan, and that step will populate the report automatically,” Dumery adds.
Nuance Healthcare is working on integrations with other dose-tracking vendors, currently a small universe that includes Dose Monitor and Aware.
Cheryl Proval,
Vice President, Executive Editor, Radiology Business
Cheryl began her career in journalism when Wite-Out was a relatively new technology. During the past 16 years, she has covered radiology and followed developments in healthcare policy. She holds a BA in History from the University of Delaware and likes nothing better than a good story, well told.