Medical imaging data reconciliation, part 4: Reconciliation of radiology reports and clinical outcomes data.

An accurate clinical assessment of how radiology report data affect health care outcomes cannot be performed without the standardization, integration, and longitudinal analysis of radiology report and clinical outcomes data. The creation of such a technology can be accomplished by creating a standardized finding-specific radiology and clinical database, in which individual report findings are assigned extensible markup language tags and tracked over time with associated clinical data. The derived knowledge can in turn be used to improve overall outcomes through the data-derived analysis of reporting accuracy, imaging utilization, the timeliness of clinical care, and compliance with best practice guidelines.