The Gaps Became the Radiologist’s Job

It didn’t happen overnight. Film went digital. Dictation moved to speech recognition. PACS, RIS, worklist, viewer and reporting tools were deconstructed and reconstructed. And AI arrived and everything is changing over again.

Most of those systems were built around their own step. Large enterprise imaging vendors set out to cover the whole workflow, from acquisition to final report, and a practice that runs one vendor end to end could hold together for a while. But add another vendor’s reporting tool, a new AI application, or an acquired site, and the gaps reopen. Those vendors also carry decades of legacy, making it hard for them to adopt new technology at the pace it moves now. So the gaps between the pieces became the radiologist’s job: the extra clicks, the re-dictated sentence, the measurement typed in twice, the second login. Along the way, the software drifted further from its purpose: helping a radiologist reach a confident finding and get it to the people who need it.

Some things went missing in those gaps, and we hear about them from radiologists and technologists in every market we work in. Six come up again and again.

Focus. The finding is why we read. Everything between the image and the final report — switching windows, reformatting, hunting for the prior — draws on the same attention the image needs. Getting focus back means the priors, measurements and patient context are already in place when the study opens.

Practice. Read, diagnose, call the referring physician, do the peer review, attend the meeting, and everything in between. Radiologists trained for years to interpret images, and a growing share of the day goes to managing the systems around them. When that load lifts, the change is measurable: at one of our clients in South Africa, radiologists now spend 90 percent of their time reading and interpreting images.

Time. The last case, the last addendum, the drive home. Volumes keep climbing faster than the number of radiologists, so the minutes lost to friction during the day turn into hours at the end of it. Every step taken out of the read is time handed back, and it adds up to evenings.

Voice. You said it once, clearly. Then came the correction, the voice command, the punctuation spoken aloud, the proofreading. Speech recognition made radiologists their own transcriptionists. Reporting tools can now follow the way a radiologist naturally speaks and build the report around it, so the report says it the way you did.

Workflow. PACS, RIS, dictation, messaging, the worklist. One study, five windows open, and data carried by hand from one to the next. When the systems talk to each other, the measurement taken at the scanner reaches the report without being typed again, and the technologist’s work flows straight to the radiologist. One Alaska practice measured a 40 percent gain in workflow efficiency once measurements stopped being re-entered by hand.

Worklist. Neuro before lunch, or quick chest X-rays to clear the queue? Every radiologist has their own way of working through a shift, and most worklists leave little room for it. Getting the day back means a worklist that respects clinical priority and still lets you read the way you read best.

For fifteen years, Kailo Medical has worked on the technologist’s side of the read, where measurements are captured and studies are prepared for the radiologist. More than 35 million cases have passed through our software, which connects the modality, RIS and PACS, whichever vendors supply them. We are now extending the same approach to the radiologist’s workflow, from the dictation and the worklist to the final report. In a nutshell, we make the right data available at the right place for the right person.

The purpose was always the radiologist and the patient. It’s time the software caught up.