Case Study: Kettering Health Network

Kettering Health Network, like most other facilities in the country, wished to reduce the number of repeat radiologic studies ordered on their patients and generally reduce the amount of radiation used to image patients across their 55-location network.

Proposal

CliniCentric recognized that a large segment of repeat radiology testing was because clinicians had a difficult time using then available HIT to assemble and understand a patient’s composite radiologic (and radiation) history across all institutions visited by the patient.

CliniCentric proposed to solve the problem by:

  • Aggregating, normalizing, and enriching a patient’s radiology study history across all institutions in SW Ohio.
  • Presenting an in-workflow, summary radiology score to raise clinician awareness to increased levels of past radiology usage
  • Provide an interactive report accessible with one click from the EHR, that displayed and highlighted a patient’s complete radiologic history in a single viewpoint.

Project

CliniCentric worked with HealthBridge, the major HIE in Ohio, to aggregate over 20 million past and current Radiology ORUs for all participating institutions. We developed, and received a US patent for, a Radiation and Diagnostic Study (RADS) Score that numerically captured the relative radiology usage (and radiation risk) a patient incurred over time, across all institutions.

Then, we built and deployed the multi-use Convergence API that enabled an automated query and retrieve system for a RADS Score as well as one-click access to an interactive and graphically enhanced RADS Report directly from KHN’s Epic EHR.

 

Outcomes

  • Over 15,000 RADS Scores are calculated and presented daily, just seconds after patient arrival.
  • Clinicians regularly reference the RADS Score and then dig for a deeper understanding in the RADS Report (or the EHR) before they order additional radiology on high scoring patients.
  • When appropriate, additional radiology testing is deferred or modified in favor of a decreased radiation and cost approach.