Radiologist Adoption of Interactive Multimedia Reporting Technology

Abstract

Purpose: To determine if radiologists find enough value in available interactive multimedia reporting technology to routinely adopt it into clinical practice.

Materials and methods: Our institution's reporting application (Vue Reporting, Carestream Health) allows the incorporation of multimedia elements, including active hyperlinks, into clinical reports, but would radiologists find enough value in this technique to change their practice? We retrospectively reviewed 559,841 diagnostic reports issued July 2016 to February 2018 for the presence of text hyperlinks that interactively connect to imaging findings in the PACS. Results were subdivided by modality, reporting radiologist role (ie, resident, fellow, attending physician), and subspecialty. Average percentages over the final 6 months were chosen to represent established adoption rates.

Results: For each modality, the 6-month average percentages of reports containing hyperlinks to imaging findings subdivided by the role of the radiologist who created the report were found to be as follows: CT: residents = 27.6%, fellows = 19.5%, attending physicians = 26.0%; MRI: residents = 26.6%, fellows = 8.7%, attending physicians = 5.1%; and PET/CT: residents = 53.3%, fellows = 46.7%, attending physicians = 19.4%. Rates were 0% to 4% among ultrasound, radiography, and nuclear medicine reports, regardless of radiologist role. The 6-month average percentages of CT and MRI reports with hyperlinks to imaging findings varied by subspecialty from 5.4% to 57.1%.

Conclusion: Our radiologists found enough value in available interactive multimedia reporting technology to adopt it into their clinical practice, commonly inserting hyperlinks into their CT, PET/CT, and MRI reports to create interactive connections to key imaging findings in the PACS.

Keywords: Interactive; hyperlinks; multimedia; reporting; reports.