In radiology, several electronic Health Information Systems (HIS) are commonly used, including Electronic Health Records (EHR), Radiology Information Systems (RIS), and Picture Archive and Communication Systems (PACS). Each HIS records partial but complementary information about the radiologic care process. Depending on the institution, the HIS that touch radiology can be not just distinct, but disparate, with different database formats and meta information semantics. Likely as a result of these practical challenges, we note no reported research on integrating the multiple HIS to allow for an end-to-end (i.e., patient check-in to finalization of the radiologic report) tracking of the care each patient receives in the Radiology Department. Therefore, the current Quality of Care (QoC) research is limited as it can only utilize the data from a siloed HIS for partial workflow. A comprehensive assessment of the QoC in radiology thus requires the multiple HIS be integrated such that various key QoC metrics over the end-to-end workflow can be extracted. Driven by this, we developed a novel technology called Department Data Depot (DDD) that integrates multiple HIS in radiology. We propose nine QoC metrics defined upon the data available from DDD that measure various dimensions of care quality such as timeliness, efficiency, patient satisfaction, and workload distribution. In this project, we develop and deploy a web application system, the Radiology Quality Dashboard (RQD) at Mayo Clinic in Arizona (MCA).

Source: Mayo Foundation