PORTER: a Prototype System for Patient-Oriented Radiology Reporting

Abstract

To empower patients to participate in their medical care and decision-making, effective communication is critical. In radiology, the clinical report is the primary medium of communication. Although radiologists historically have authored reports with the referring provider as the intended reader, patients increasingly access the reports through portals to electronic health record systems. We developed a system named PORTER (Patient-Oriented Radiology Reporter) to augment radiology reports with lay-language definitions. Our IRB-approved, HIPAA-compliant study protocol analyzed 100 knee MRI reports from an academic medical center to identify the most commonly utilized terms. A glossary of 313 terms was constructed to include definitions of the terms and, where available, links to reference sources and public-domain images. Flesch-Kincaid readability scores were computed to assure that definitions were readable at or below 10th-grade reading level. The system provided an interactive web site to view outpatient knee MRI exams. After logging in with their exam ID number and date of birth, patients viewed their report annotated with definitions from the glossary. Applicable images were displayed when the user's mouse hovered over a glossary term. This patient-oriented system can help empower patients to better understand their radiology results.

Structured radiology reporting on an institutional level—benefit or new administrative burden?

“…For example, while in multidisciplinary tumor boards it could be interesting to present a more multimedia‐enhanced report and graphically visualize temporal changes in tumor burden as extracted from measurements recorded in structured reports, patients could benefit if in a cross‐border healthcare setting reports could automatically be translated to different languages or augmented with terms more easily understandable for lay patients. Again, similar approaches have already been implemented and described …”

“…Again, similar approaches have already been implemented and described. 40,41 Implications for the future of radiology Certainly, the shift from an analog, film-based workflow to a fully digitized environment with picture archiving and communication systems and speech recognition systems was the first major change in radiological practice. More recently, it seems obvious that for radiology, just like for most other medical subspecialties, the next major shift in practice is imminent and will be the seen through the adoption of big data and machine learning technology.…”

Customer Service in Radiology: Satisfying Your Patients and Referrers

“…As the practice of radiology has changed, there has been a greater emphasis on making the patient the primary customer. Some of these changes include opening a radiology clinic so that patients can discuss upcoming imaging studies or recent results with radiologists, providing layperson translations of radiology reports, and offering patients easier access to their imaging results (6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14).…”

Essential Elements of Natural Language Processing: What the Radiologist Should Know

“…The diagnostic report is a written document consisting of the radiologist's interpretation of all findings detected on an imaging study. Its primary function is to communicate findings and recommendations to the referring provider and À increasingly À the patient (1,2). Therefore, many radiologists exercise high levels of discretion in their word choices to ensure that the medical knowledge contained in the image interpretation is translated precisely onto the text.…”