Purpose: The past decades have showed a steady incline in the use of imaging for medical diagnostics in all medical disciplines. Imaging has transcended from an auxiliary tool, supporting the diagnosis, to the primary diagnostic method in many cases. Imaging is so prevalent today, that not performing a specific imaging prior to diagnosis can even be considered as malpractice. Consequentially, the workloads on the imaging pipelines has greatly increased. Due to this, the radiology unit has to continuously prioritize the current tasks at hand in order to provide timely service in order of importance.
Our aim is to present an exclusive workload monitoring software solution that provides real- time workload analysis and assists in task management during residents’ shifts.
Methods: An in-house monitoring tool has been developed. The monitoring dashboard receives it`s data from the hospital`s patient management (NAMER) system, summarizes and displays key indicators regarding the shift workload and tasks: Number of patients in the internal and surgical ERs, number of patients waiting for imaging (CT and US), number of patients waiting for imaging results, as well as relevant delays in reporting times.
Depending on the level of the workload the system will provide graded recommendations decreasing current workload level and preventing collapse of the imaging ward: halt in providing on call consultations, writing abridged imaging reports, operating additional CT scanners.
The systems recommendation also encapsulates an additional important benefit in the fact that it frees the resident from making decisions based on irrelevant factors.
Results: The system was deployed several months ago in several phases:
First phase - the system was only running in data collecting mode, providing a display and recommendations that were disregarded.
Second phase - the system commenced recommendation mode, and current timing is being analyzed in order to compare to previous workload peaks and performance.
The system and its recommendations managed to routinely throttle the workload and enable timely service to all imaging consumers, preventing an increasing backlog that can affect the quality of service of the entire medical center even in the following day.
Actual data describing the change in average timing and workload will be presented.
Conclusions: The increase in imaging demand alongside the increasing shortage of radiologists has proven to be a substantial hurdle in providing the quality care that the medical center wishes to provide. Therefore, a monitoring system was required in order to throttle the workload and make better use of the available resources.
