New strategies for medical data mining, part 3: automated workflow analysis and optimization.

The practice of evidence-based medicine calls for the creation of "best practice" guidelines, leading to improved clinical outcomes. One of the primary factors limiting evidence-based medicine in radiology today is the relative paucity of standardized databases. The creation of standardized medical imaging databases offer the potential to enhance radiologist workflow and diagnostic accuracy through objective data-driven analytics, which can be categorized in accordance with specific variables relating to the individual examination, patient, provider, and technology being used. In addition to this "global" database analysis, "individual" radiologist workflow can be analyzed through the integration of electronic auditing tools into the PACS. The combination of these individual and global analyses can ultimately identify best practice patterns, which can be adapted to the individual attributes of end users and ultimately used in the creation of automated evidence-based medicine workflow templates.