Current DI workflow challenges and ideas for Interoperability Working Group development

Hello Diane and the DI Community,

This an update on Radiology Structured Reporting from activities with the IHE Radiology Technical Committee and s suggestion as per Diane's post.

We participated on work for an IHE MRRT Conditional Logic Change Proposal (CP #307), this will insure the MRRT profile has a spec to allow for conditional logic content for templating, this CP has gone out for public comment and will be reviewed at this week's IHE Radiology Technical Committee face-to-face meetings in Oakbrook, Illinois.

Last year, we submitted a proposal to IHE for the development of a Structured and Coded (Synoptic) Radiology Report Content Profile, we withdrew this proposal with the intent of re-submitting for this year's cycle, we did not have sufficient time and resources required for this effort last year. Unfortunately it does not look like we will be able to re-submit for this year, a more pressing work effort has emerged with taking DICOM Part 20 through HL7. The DICOM WG who worked on DICOM Part 20 - Imaging Reports using HL7 Clinical Document Architecture,re also sit as the HL7 WG who would review, revise and incorporate this content into theHL7 standard, so we thought there would be minimal effort in achieving this goal. As changes happen in the standards world, HL7 has adopted a new requirement, we now are required to "run DICOM Part 20 through Art Décor object verification prior to consideration and approval by HL7".

My Suggestion, this is an opportunity for the DI Community to participate in the preparation of DICOM 20 for HL7 consideration. I invite Teri Sippel Schmidt for thoughts and comments.

Regards, Dave.

The XRR-WD profile is moving forward as a work item with the IHE Radiology Technical Committee. We are now looking for additional interoperability projects for the DI community to take and develop. In the past there have been a number of suggestions.

1. Radiation Dose Monitoring
2. Critical Results Notification

Please respond to this post if you have any other suggestions. Our next meeting is April 8th at noon. We will be having a discussion at that meeting to develop the work plan for 16/17.

What about the idea of transitioning from a Diagnostic Imaging Repository to a Medical Imaging Repository? In Alberta, we are starting down the road of investigating adding other "ologies" to our repository; some items that need discussion are governance, technical feasibility, viewer options, etc. Cleveland Clinic has started making the transition, and one of their lessons learned was to have an "Enterprise Imaging Strategy". If we look at Infoway priorities, this would be a big win for interoperability.

As we make the transition from the SCWG forums to the new Communities and Forums on InfoCentral we are looking for input from you, the DI Community, on new work items that would be of value. Specifically what interoperability challenges continue to exist in DI that we could address? As items are suggested we would present them for approval and the subsequent development of an interoperability working group to develop the solution. As items are presented for discussion we will be creating them as a discussion topic and asking someone to moderate the discussion.
Please encourage Radiologists to participate in this discussion so that we can ensure that they have a forum to share their current workflow challenges and ideas for improvement.