Automating radiologist workflow part 1: the digital consultation.

With the widespread adoption of picture archiving and communication systems and filmless imaging, ubiquitous and instantaneous access to imaging data has resulted in decreased radiologist-clinician consultations. It is therefore imperative that the radiology community develop new communication strategies to improve both the timeliness and the perceived value of the radiology report. One strategy to accomplish this goal is the creation of electronic consultation tools, which can effectively recreate radiologist workflow and the identification of key pathologic findings in an easy-to-use, well-organized, and timely fashion. This would be accomplished by recording radiologist-computer interactions using an electronic auditing tool, storing these interactions in an extensible markup language schema, which can subsequently be played back at a later point in time to recreate the radiologist consultation. This approach has the added benefits of allowing the radiologist to selectively edit content to the needs of different clinician users, index the comprehensive consultation into pathology-specific components, and perform asynchronous bidirectional consultations. This electronic consultation tool would result in the creation of context and user-specific consultation files, which can in turn be integrated with clinical data from electronic medical records.