Why Structured Reporting is Needed in Cardiology

Cardiology was already heavily data driven, where clinical practice is driven by clinical study data, but mining a cardiology department's own data via the cardiovascular information system (CVIS or cardiac PACS) allows insights into a department's own patient population, best practices, workflow, physician and technologist workloads, inventory usage and patient outcomes. This data is now being leveraged to flow into a variety of clinical registries, certification programs, data mining for population health initiatives, and for the training and integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms that are starting to be adopted across the healthcare continuum. "We need to be able to retrieve these data elements out of the medical records. But when we talk about traditional methods of data collection like transcription and paper-based documentation, it really does not allow clinicians to get this data out, so there is a need for structured reporting," said Jennifer Ireland, senior product manager, Centricity Cardio Workflow, GE Healthcare. She said structured reports need to be integrated into clinical workflows, and that clinicians need three things from these structured reports: what they saw, what they did and what is the end result, including their own conclusion or recommendation.