2021-04-06
Redefining Radiology
Each year, the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) announces a new slogan for its annual meeting, which serves as a good indicator of where the radiology industry is heading towards. With this year’s slogan “Redefining Radiology,” RSNA seeks to rethink the role of radiologists and redefine what it means to work as a radiologist.
RSNA News, https://www.rsna.org/news/announcements/annual-meeting
Radiologists, the new healthcare data scientists
All of today’s major industrial changes revolve around data, as is the case for the healthcare industry. And who is to play the central role in this transition? The radiologists, because they are the ones with the deepest knowledge and experience when it comes to data interpretations. It would be up to these new data scientists to interpret and share insights extracted from medical images and data, ultimately leading the way towards more data-driven, higher-quality care.
INFINITT PACS 7.0, the AI-empowered, intelligent PACS
As the role of radiologists evolve, their PACS—the right-hand assistant—needs to evolve as well. In this sense, INFINITT PACS 7.0 has established itself as the global standard for AI-enabled PACS. Here are three key points on how INFINITT PACS 7.0 effectively supports the expanding role of future radiologists:
#1 Integrating AI into your daily workflow
From university hospitals to local clinics, most healthcare providers are very interested in adopting artificial intelligence (AI) solutions into their radiology workflow regardless of their facility sizes. However, what a lot of them overlook is how seamlessly these AI solutions could be incorporated into their PACS workflow. There’s no point in adopting the latest AI technology if it doesn’t fully blend into the existing workflow, because it won’t be of any substantial use in a day-to-day basis.
INFINITT PACS 7.0 fully integrates AI into daily radiology workflow, giving radiologists access to an entire pool of top-notch AI tools directly from the PACS viewer. With just a few clicks, they can easily refer to AI findings while reading images on PACS. This direct access to the latest AI technologies empowers radiologists to perform better, by improving reading accuracy and the overall efficiency of the reading workflow.
#2 Reinforcing collaboration
As the healthcare paradigm shifts towards patient-centered care, collaboration between medical specialists is becoming more and more important as a means to enhance the quality of care and the overall patient satisfaction. Unfortunately, many radiologists are experiencing limitations when it comes to co-working with each other or other physicians. For example, in order to request for second opinion reviews or to take part in multidisciplinary conferences or meetings, you have to locate, extract and download whatever image you want to discuss and hand it over to your colleague on a CD or a USB. This process itself takes a couple of hours at least and up to a couple of days at most.
INFINITT PACS 7.0 provides a flexible environment for data sharing, making it a lot easier for radiologists to participate in collaborative care. For example, if there’s a patient image you’d like a colleague to take a look at, you could simply make a URL link for that specific image and send the link over an email. Your colleague would then click on the URL to open up the image on ULite, our web-based universal viewer, without having to install anything. Any personal information included in these images can be anonymized and encrypted to ensure secure sharing of patient data at all times. You can also drag and drop images onto our messenger tool, INFINITT Communicator, and have real-time discussions with your colleagues over various cases.
INFINITT PACS 7.0 reinforces cross-departmental collaboration by improving the efficiency of the collaborative process. You can save images exactly as you see them on your monitor and manage them by topics and dates for each conference or MDT meeting. On the day of the meeting, you can simply open up the image with your own annotations and viewing layouts intact. You can head directly into in-depth discussions without wasting any time on locating and setting the image layout.
#3 Maximizing reading productivity
The advances in imaging technology and the expansion of radiology reimbursements have led to a major increase in the number of radiological examinations taking place each year. At the same time, new tasks and responsibilities on data utilization and collaborative care, which come with the growing number of data, have only added more burden to the radiologists’ workload. This is why maximizing reading productivity is crucial for radiologists.
INFINITT PACS 7.0 keeps radiologists focused and productive by automatically updating their worklist based on AI analysis results (study severity & priority levels), study emergency levels, user workloads and schedules. This all takes place in real time so that the radiologists no longer have to put in resources into searching and deciding which study to read next. By simply following the reading order as provided in the PACS worklist, they could improve both the efficiency and the timeliness of the diagnostic process.
