The story at a glance
- Traditional radiology workflows are not sustainable -- they are inefficient, create burnout and friction, and aren’t able to effectively accomodate the requirements of remote reading and teleradiology.
- AI-driven radiology workflows allow for intelligent worklists, smarter caseload management, and enhanced patient care.
- Check out the Comprehensive Guide to Workflow Orchestration for practical strategies on evaluating and implementing intelligent worklist management, and real-world examples of how smarter workflow orchestration has dramatically improved the physician experience and patient care.
Radiologists are handling more cases than ever before. Between health system staff shortages, growing imaging volumes, and increasingly complex studies, the old approaches to healthcare workflow automation are breaking down. Fortunately, a smarter approach has emerged for both better patient care and smoother experiences for providers: workflow orchestration.
What is medical imaging workflow orchestration?
Medical imaging workflow orchestration consolidates multiple worklists from systems across healthcare provider departments and functions into a single intelligent interface. Instead of juggling separate PACS, RIS, and EMR / EHR systems, radiologists can instead access all their studies, patient data, and AI insights from one unified workspace that is tricked out with advanced tools and automations aimed at accelerating their productivity and decision-making.
Why the traditional radiology workflow is no longer sustainable
The “carousel” reading room — where radiologists roll between different monitors for different systems — creates inefficiency and burnout. Manually distributing cases to members of a radiology team leads to cherry-picking and unbalanced workloads. Multiple disconnected worklists force constant context switching, disrupting radiologists’ focus, decision-making and diagnostic accuracy. The rise of remote reading and outsourced teleradiology introduces additional new requirements for efficiently managing workloads across geographically distributed teams.
These fragmented medical imaging workflows contribute to the 78% of radiologists reporting moderate to severe burnout, according to recent studies.
Key benefits of an AI-driven workflow in radiology
Intelligent worklist management: AI algorithms automatically prioritize cases based on urgency, study type, and radiologist expertise. Critical findings like stroke alerts or pulmonary embolisms get immediate attention.
Smarter caseload management: Advanced distribution engines ensure equitable workload balancing across your team. Early adopters report 34% more balanced case distribution and elimination of cherry-picking behaviors.
Enhanced patient care: By reducing administrative overhead and improving diagnostic speed, radiologists can focus on what matters most: accurate diagnoses and timely patient care.
Unifying the medical imaging workflow into a single view
Workflow orchestrators integrate seamlessly with existing PACS, RIS, and EMR systems, presenting all relevant information in one interface. Radiologists no longer need multiple logins or different user interfaces; everything they need is accessible from their primary workspace.
This unified approach reduces context switching and significantly improves the physician experience.
Intelligent routing and AI-assisted prioritization
Modern workflow orchestration platforms use AI to automatically route studies to the appropriate specialist. A coronary CTA goes directly to the cardiac radiologist, while a potential stroke case gets flagged for the neuro team. This intelligent routing ensures the right expert sees the right case at the right time.
Ensuring equitable case distribution among staff
Automated case distribution eliminates manual assignment bias and ensures fair workload distribution. The system considers factors like radiologist subspecialty, current workload, shift hours, and study urgency to optimize assignments while maintaining quality standards. A study conducted by Merge showed a 34% improvement in workload balance equitability across a radiology team using workflow orchestration.
The 6 essential features of modern radiology workflow solutions
Medical imaging automation platforms should prioritize these six capabilities:
1. User-centered design: Intuitive interfaces that radiologists actually enjoy using, with familiar elements like buttons, emojis, and personalized layouts.
2. AI readiness: Seamless integration with current and future AI-driven diagnostic tools, where processing status is clearly visible in worklists.
3. Enterprise scalability: Cloud-native architecture supports distributed reading, efficient data-sharing, and scalability to grow with your organization.
4. Robust security: HIPAA-compliant systems with enterprise-grade security features to protect patient data.
5. Comprehensive integration: Standards-based connectivity with any vendor’s PACS, RIS, or EMR / EHR system.
6. Cloud capabilities: Cloud-based or cloud-native capabilities are a must to achieve anywhere, anytime access to clinical workflows in real-time, and ensure data security, privacy and enterprise-wide uptime.
Why adopting workflow orchestration is crucial for your practice
The future of radiology depends on technology that can enhance healthcare professionals’ experience, support decision-making and patient safety, and make a shift from managing administrative tasks to placing more focus on patient care. Workflow orchestration does exactly this.
As imaging volumes continue growing and AI tools become more prevalent, early adopters of workflow orchestrators will gain a competitive advantage in recruitment and retention among clinical, technical, and administrative staff -- all to the benefit of both the physician experience and patient satisfaction.
Ready to transform your medical imaging workflows? Merge’s solution for Workflow Orchestration is designed by practicing radiologists, for radiologists, to address the real-world challenges you face by the people who know them best, in order to make reading enjoyable while also improving patient outcomes.
Now is the time to reimagine your imaging worklist. Check out our new Comprehensive Guide for Workflow Orchestration to discover what workflow orchestration can do for your practice, care teams, and patients.
