Enable enhanced productivity by orchestrating radiology workflow

Enhance productivity and efficiency for optimized workflows

The workflow of the Campus Bio-Medico needed to provide 7/7 days coverage, while ensuring that the specialist skills would always be available. Streamlining workflow is imperative not only, then, to deliver a high level of patient care, but also to address the very real challenge of radiologist burnout. Dr. Carlo Cosimo Quattrocchi explains: “All skills must always be covered. It is not enough to manage the radiological work in terms of time and competence. Therefore, a tool was needed that could direct examinations to radiologists who had the closest skills to give the best answers to the question - in terms of time and competence.”

A key part of the collaborative solution installed at Campus Bio-Medico is the smart workflow-management system called Philips Radiology Workflow Orchestrator, that is designed to automatically determine the best match to help deliver the right case to the right radiologist, based on their area of expertise, availability and current workload.

Communication capabilities are enhanced to allow online chat as well as enabling context and screen sharing to drive diagnostic concordance so that a radiologist reading the exam can connect to another specialist using native chat and screen-sharing to discuss the case in a secure digital environment, giving the patient the best chance of timely diagnosis and effective treatment.

Dr. Quattrocchi explains: “Before having the solution, in order to ask for a second opinion, the radiologist used to have to move from one location to another. They’d then have to reach a colleague, interrupting the colleague’s work as well as their own. Now all of this can be done via chat. With chat, we can screen share the images being reported at that precise moment without having to interrupt the reciprocal workflow. This function makes it possible to consult with a colleague and arrive at an answer even earlier.”

Quality and efficiency of reporting was key to Campus Bio-Medico University Hospital. To avoid manual importing of relevant findings and to have a faster turnarounds on exams delivering greater clinical value, the native interactive reporting was introduced in the workspace. The interactive multimedia eliminates the need for a separate reporting solution. It enables the radiologist to automate the insertion of image-related information into the report and in return, the referring physician receives a clearer, tracked, more insightful report with the ability to make simple volumetric comparisons and bookmarking tools that allow for the marking up, retrieval, viewing and follow up over time.

Campus Bio-Medico University Hospital estimates that, after the implementation of the solution there was reduction in the standard deviation among radiologists from 3,5 days to 2,1 days, reducing the TAT of 40%. In addition, after the implementation Campus Bio-Medico identified a significant reduction from 3.5 to 2.1% of customer complaints on receiving the reporting in time.

In 2014, in order to optimize the radiology workflow, Campus Bio-Medico Hospital decided to replace the RIS and PACS modules previously used in the hospital to deliver a hybrid cloud solution and disaster recovery backup, comprising all existing and past exams and reports. The solution removed the need for hardware and structure management, as those services would now be managed by Philips, saving time and resources of the IT department.

Moving to cloud based services represented a future focused solution to Campus Bio-Medico challenges, propelling the institution to a next level. Marco Venditti, Head of IT Operations reflects: “The key factor that made us choose Philips was because this project was mainly cloud-based. The model the team presented was very mature and the business model was based on pay per use. The resilience of the solution’s hybrid approach with the Cloud Connect in-house and the cloud outside is very satisfying.”