Interactive Multimedia Reporting Technical Considerations: HIMSS-SIIM Collaborative White Paper

Abstract

Despite technological advances in the analysis of digital images for medical consultations, many health information systems lack the ability to correlate textual descriptions of image findings linked to the actual images. Images and reports often reside in separate silos in the medical record throughout the process of image viewing, report authoring, and report consumption. Forward-thinking centers and early adopters have created interactive reports with multimedia elements and embedded hyperlinks in reports that connect the narrative text with the related source images and measurements. Most of these solutions rely on proprietary single-vendor systems for viewing and reporting in the absence of any encompassing industry standards to facilitate interoperability with the electronic health record (EHR) and other systems. International standards have enabled the digitization of image acquisition, storage, viewing, and structured reporting. These provide the foundation to discuss enhanced reporting. Lessons learned in the digital transformation of radiology and pathology can serve as a basis for interactive multimedia reporting (IMR) across image-centric medical specialties. This paper describes the standard-based infrastructure and communications to fulfill recently defined clinical requirements through a consensus from an international workgroup of multidisciplinary medical specialists, informaticists, and industry participants. These efforts have led toward the development of an Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) profile that will serve as a foundation for interoperable interactive multimedia reporting.

Artificial intelligence and skin cancer

“…One skin disease classifier that integrated up to six clinical images and 45 demographic items and medical history to classify 26 skin conditions as the primary prediction outperformed six primary care physicians and six nurse practitioners ( 4 ). Another study showed that a model integrating dermatoscopic and macroscopic images with three patient metadata variables outperformed models with just one image modality for binary and multiclass classification setting ( 106 , 107 ).…”

HIMSS-SIIM Enterprise Imaging Community White Papers: Reflections and Future Directions

“…Unfortunately, most medical documentation today remains exclusively free text with limited, if any, links to multimedia elements or interactivity. The second white paper from the IMR workgroup outlined the technical barriers impeding the broader usage of interactive multimedia reporting [ 70 ]. This paper conceptually divided the reporting process into report creation, report exchange, and report viewing.…”