PQC in radiology means an assessment of a report issued by another radiologist. The purpose is to enhance the accuracy and quality of written reports, thereby, improving patient care, but it also has an educational purpose for the first author.
Peer review is performed routinely by most radiologists as part of their everyday clinical practice. It occurs particularly when reviewing studies at multidisciplinary meetings and during issuing of a new report or comparing it to priors.
In these settings, if a discrepancy is found, the reviewing radiologist most often does not inform the original author with the new findings due to multiple factors, such as lack of time or workload.
One of the major problems with peer reviewing is the lack of anonymity which leads to a biased scoring for colleagues.
Our software permits anonymous reviewing of radiological reports by another radiologist, also reviewing the technical quality of a performed examination by another technician.
The images are drawn from the PACS in a DICOM format with only technical information displayed, and the corresponding report is drawn from the RIS also without any regards of the original author or any personal information of the patient.
The software will automatically choose 2-3% of the reports send a notification to the reviewer, who rates it from 1-4 according to the ACR RADPEER Scoring System.
If significant discrepancies between the reports, the system sends the reports to the department head who acts accordingly.
We will present our in-house developed APQC tool and first impressions.
