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At HIMSS09, a broader audience of hospital administrators and IT executives will be exposed to the numerous ways Softek Illuminate™ can contribute to improved productivity in the radiology suite, to higher government and insurance reimbursements, and to the quality of care for patients receiving scans.

The introduction at last fall’s RSNA of Softek Solutions’ data-mining and notification solution for Philips iSite, captured the attention of radiologists from around the world eager to have better access to the information stored in their PACS.

At HIMSS09, Softek will be located in booth 6119 adjacent to Philips, its API partner. “Philips acknowledges the incredible value Illuminate adds to a hospital’s iSite investment,” said Softek CEO Matt McLenon, “which is why leading up to HIMSS they invited us to introduce Illuminate to the European radiology community.” Softek reps attended both ECR 2009, the annual congress of the European Society of Radiology March 6-10 in Vienna, and the annual meeting for Philips’ European sales team this past February in Malta.

Instantaneous reporting and trend analysis

According to McLenon, Illuminate expands the traditional PACS from a data storage system to an information retrieval and messaging system. Information in the PACS that once was virtually trapped now can be retrieved in a time frame that allows doctors to affect the clinical decision process. Administrative functions also are made easier by Illuminate. Hospital administrators can easily review past studies to:

· Analyze all types of radiology trends at their facilities.

· Determine results of high-cost exam ordering based on diagnosis group or referring physician.

· Track cases for maximum CMS bonuses and insurance reimbursement.

· Continually track report quality in accordance with PQRI requirements.

The subsequent data analysis can lead to protocol and reporting changes that would produce savings and benefits such as:

· Reduction in unnecessary imaging tests.

· Reduction in radiation exposure rates of patients.

· Higher CMS and insurance reimbursements.

· Proof of appropriate reporting, if audited.

“Insurers and government health agencies are enacting voluntary and mandatory reporting quality programs,” said Safwan Halabi, M.D., senior staff radiologist and director of imaging informatics at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. In late January, for example, CMS announced its 2009 measure applicability validation process, which expands the quality measures data that some facilities will have to report before receiving PQRI reimbursements.

“If health systems are unable to retrospectively and prospectively evaluate the content and quality of their reports, they may be penalized with decreased reimbursement,” Dr. Halabi said.

Lower CT dosages for children

“Our ultimate goal is to protect our patients and improve their care,” he said, “and we are just beginning to realize the important role that data-mining our radiology reports plays in reaching that goal. Thankfully, Illuminate allows us to search through all our reports and images with ease and speed.”

Dr. Halabi used Illuminate to track the radiation exposure of children receiving CT scans at Henry Ford. Challenged by the Image Gently campaign of the Alliance for Radiation Safety in Pediatric Imaging, the hospital is working to eliminate unnecessary CT scans and lower radiation doses on necessary ones to the lowest amount needed. “Using Illuminate, we were able to look back at all our CT data on children under 18 years of age and determine where we could still get the same diagnosis quality but with a lower dosage,” which ultimately will reduce the risk of cancer in children, he said. “Now that we have the data, we can evaluate it for necessary protocol changes that will bring us into 100 percent compliance with the Image Gently protocols.”

Clinician collaboration

Another benefit to patient care comes from the collaboration Illuminate enables between referring physicians and radiologists as well as among the radiologists themselves. Dr. Halabi said that Illuminate is making it easy for his colleagues to:

· Form image communities to share information on studies and consult with each other. PACS images are automatically attached to all notifications sent about a particular report.

· Notify referring physicians of critical result reports and receive confirmation that reports were received.

· Track patients to ensure follow-up imaging is performed.

· Track patients to confirm preliminary diagnoses.

“I may have been recommending a CT every time I see a certain entity,” Dr. Halabi said. “If I can follow up with those patients, I can see if I made the right recommendation. If it turned out the patients didn’t need the CT, I’ll stop recommending it.”

Ease of use

Illuminate is a plug-and-play product fully integrated into iSite. With its proprietary free-text search technology, it gives iSite users split-second access to all radiology reports and images in their system. Searches are performed just as they would be in Google™. From the Illuminate search screen, users simply type in the word or words pertaining to the studies they want to find. Advanced functions allow searches to be as broad or narrow as users desire. Illuminate’s patent-pending crawler algorithm, which gathers and indexes all the text stored on iSite, assures that a listing of all corresponding reports will typically appear in less than a second. In addition, a Relevance Algorithm ranks the results so that the most relevant positive notations appear first.

Softek Solutions, Inc. was founded in 1995 by McLenon and David Fletcher, two veterans of the medical software industry. Besides Illuminate, Softek manufactures Panther, a management system that monitors Cerner Millennium™. “What makes us unique among many companies in the healthcare field,” McLenon said, “is that Softek is run by people who understand computer software. As a true software company, we listen continually to the concerns of decision makers at hospitals around the country and then develop the software innovations that meet those ever-growing needs. We’re empowering hospitals to do what they want to do: provide the best patient care possible.”

Source: Softek Solutions Inc.