Development of a radiology report monitoring system for case tracking.

Abstract

The objective was to develop an automated system to monitor and collect radiology reports for case-tracking purposes. The system we developed allows users to automate the case-tracking process for either clinical follow-up or teaching purposes. With this system, radiologists can initiate the tracking of a case by dictating a keyword into the report. Any existing and future reports associated with the same patient will be collected automatically. The schematic that we developed is based on the Health Level Seven (HL7) standard, which is platform-independent. In our implementation, we used an IBM-compatible computer and commercially available software. Users can monitor the case-tracking progress from Web browsers.