Today, Nuance announced it has added several new innovations to its PowerScribe 360 version 3.5 diagnostic imaging solution designed to help radiologists enhance patient care. These include multimedia reports, advanced lung cancer screening registry reporting and enhanced quality guidance content for radiologists at the point of interpretation.
Multimedia Reporting
Nuance PowerScribe 360 version 3.5 enables relevant PACS images to be embedded into reports for sharing of multimedia reports between physicians, which provide a more comprehensive picture of a patient’s condition, helping referring physicians better understand findings and discuss treatment options with specialists and patients.
This rich information at a glance goes beyond traditional text-based radiology reports, helping ordering physicians and radiologists see prior images, notations, captions as well as specific areas of focus and comparison in patient cases. Multimedia reports are particularly important in complex cases and specialty areas, such as oncology where specialists are looking for growth of tumors and need that information quickly.
“In radiology, a picture really is worth a thousand words,” says Dr. Christopher J. Roth, assistant professor of radiology, vice chair of information technology and clinical informatics, and director of imaging informatics strategy at Duke University Hospital in an official statement. “Being able to show an actual image to referring physicians and their patients, and walk through what that study is telling us is a huge win for patient care. Having the right information is critical to making the most informed decisions.”
Automated Lung Cancer Screening (LCS) Reporting & Registry Submission
In 2015, the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) agreed to support Medicare coverage and reimbursement for CT lung screening programs to slow deaths from lung cancer; however, this ruling included strict criteria for tracking and reporting, which have placed a steep burden on hospitals and imaging centers trying to run these programs. Nuance now offers a solution to bypass manual data extraction, and pull data on LCS patients directly from PowerScribe 360 reports and automatically transfer relevant data to the American College of Radiology (ACR) National Radiology Data Registry through a new PowerShare Registry Reporting Service.
This one-of-a-kind lung cancer screening reporting tool uses the combined power of the PowerScribe 360 reporting platform with Nuance’s PowerShare™ Network to ease the creation and ongoing management of lung cancer screening programs. This will make it easier for physicians and hospitals to screen and follow high risk patients and gain reimbursement for these services.
Enhanced Quality Guidance
PowerScribe 360 version 3.5 also includes updates to Quality Guidance providing evidence-based clinical guidance to radiologists at their workstations using recommendations from The American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC), Society of Radiologists in Ultrasound (SRU), and American Association for the Surgery of Trauma (AAST). Coupled with existing content developed by the ACR on incidental findings (ACR Assist), Nuance quality assurance tools deliver real-time clinical insights to radiologists at the point of interpretation to save time, while providing more consistent and clinically effective guidance following an exam.
