Collaborative Development of a PACS-Integrated Quality Control Dashboard: a Single Institutional Experience

Abstract

Regular communication between technologists and radiologists is necessary for maintaining optimal diagnostic image quality throughout a radiology practice. In a large hospital system with multiple sites, this task becomes increasingly difficult without simultaneously causing significant disruptions in the clinical workflow and decreased throughput. Thus, establishing a system for quality control reporting that enables effective communication in a seamless and convenient manner is imperative. In this report, we describe the development of a new integrated system, in collaboration with our PACS vendor, with tools that allow for instant reporting of quality errors and dashboards providing real-time up-to-date quality data across our hospital system, directly accessible from PACS. To date, 8,167 quality reports have been logged in our new system with roughly 355 submissions per month. Early user engagement and consensus feedback among radiologists and technologists have been positive suggesting an overall improvement from prior systems. We hope this report can help inform other radiology enterprises seeking to improve quality control reporting within their clinical practice.

Keywords: Communication; PACS; Quality assurance; Quality control; Radiology; Technologist.

Fig. 1

Screen capture of the previous web-based form utilized by the radiology department at UH. This form could be launched from a link within the PACS application or alternatively found on the hospital intranet page. Once opened, the form required manual entry of the relevant fields by the submitting radiologist

Fig. 2

Sample screen capture of the tech QA form which, when opened within PACS, automatically populates all unique identifiers for the current imaging study being viewed at the workstation. The user has the option to select from several drop-down bars in order to categorize the QC submission. There is also an option for free text to include additional feedback relevant to the submission

Fig. 3

Sample screen capture of the QA tool display of a QC submission following review by the relevant supervising technologist. Once the feedback has been acknowledged and routed back to the submitting user, the QC submission can either be closed or escalated for further review if the user feels that the issue has not been adequately addressed

Fig. 4

Screen capture of the analytics dashboards displaying QC data based on site, modality, exam type, section, submitting radiologist, and type of QC issue. Each of these fields can be analyzed in more detail when individually selected with options to modify date ranges, x- and y-axes, and/or export to excel, among other options

Fig. 5

Percentage of QC submissions from January 2019 to March 2021 by modality

Fig. 6

Breakdown of QC submissions from January 2019 to March 2021 by radiology subspecialty