Reimagine the imaging worklist

Throughout their day, clinicians depend heavily on worklists to organize and drive their activity. When a case has been read and marked complete, they turn back to the worklist to select the next case.

There is a constant back and forth between viewing the list and reading each case, which is frequently interrupted by calls, questions, searches for more information, or other distractions.

Rules engines can help with the prioritization of cases within each worklist, but when there are multiple, disconnected worklists, clinicians must maneuver between them at any given time.

Also, new tools added to the imaging workspace can offer valuable clinical insights and time-savings, but from the user’s standpoint, they can also add complexity to existing imaging environments. Overlay this reality onto the growing number and complexity of cases, and it’s easy to understand the widespread job stress and burnout growing among imaging professionals today.

Among teams of radiologists, equitable distribution of cases is an understandable concern. It is problematic when radiologists select certain studies to work on, for reasons of personal preference, remuneration, or other factors. This can create friction across a team, and compromise the optimal processing of the daily caseload, potentially impacting patient care.

A shared worklist that automates the distribution of all cases according to business rules can support transparency, reinforce equitability, utilize available resources effectively, and save time. Certainly, it reduces personal bias that may occur from manually distributing cases across a team.

Across the patient imaging process end-to-end, various systems and professionals are involved at every phase. When there are disconnects between steps, the process becomes vulnerable to miscommunications, unnecessary delays, time-consuming manual efforts, or—in worst cases—mistakes or waste. These negative impacts can be felt at every level, affecting the patient, physician, care team, imaging department or healthcare provider enterprise wide.

For leaders looking across the enterprise, siloed systems obscure the view of patient experiences and cause blind spots to opportunities for improvement. The patient’s journey starts with a physician’s referral leading to an imaging appointment within hours or maybe not for months. In the time elapsed between referral and scan, what are the costs and the opportunities for improved efficiency, care interventions or additional revenue? In other cases, if the patient experience begins in an acute care scenario – such as an emergency department - then a disjointed process can add friction that can negatively affect actions and decisions across the care team.

Opportunities to improve the patient’s (and clinicians’) experience would be clearer with a centralized aggregated view to the progress of all imaging cases – types, volumes, status, and processing speed. These valuable insights can expose opportunities for improvement.

Workflow tools must get easier to use—not harder. They must integrate smoothly and seamlessly into existing workflows, to present information in a useful way that improves the clinician’s experience, as well as the performance of the broader imaging team and the organization at large.

Merge has evolved the radiology worklist to an enterpriselevel solution that can be used by anyone involved in imaging processes – within and outside the organization. This innovation is rooted in more than 30 years of experience working with a variety of clients across acute and ambulatory settings on hundreds of PACS and enterprise imaging projects, as well as nearly a decade of building, testing and marketing AI solutions.

Introducing the latest workflow innovation from Merative: Merge Workflow Orchestrator.

Merge Workflow Orchestrator is designed to consolidate, organize, and present the information clinicians need to efficiently manage caseloads, throughout the end-to-end imaging process and across the enterprise. It ensures that users can focus on reading, diagnosing, and reporting findings in the way that is most efficient for them, while eliminating disjointed worklists that impede productivity. It also supports broader team activities and enables organization-wide visibility to some factors that could impact the patient experience.

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Prioritize user experience: Good workflow systems are based on user-centered design, and should be as intuitive as consumer mobile applications on smart devices. Merge Workflow Orchestrator was created with radiologists’ experience in mind – to provide full functionality and a great user experience. It leverages common and familiar application elements (e.g., buttons, sliders, emojis, and more) and allows users to personalize aspects of the interface to meet their needs.

The novel “card view” of the worklist offers a refreshing departure from traditional spreadsheet views, and users can toggle between the two with a single click. optimal order in which to review the studies – a decision that can be overwhelmed by numerous headwinds, including interruptions, fatigue, stress, and human error.

Remote reading: Built on scalable, extensible cloudnative technology, Merge Workflow Orchestrator is ideal for imaging organizations that have distributed reading and radiology workflows. It excels in supporting “anywhere reading” for all radiologists, whether local, remote, or in rotation between several locations.

Access to advanced diagnostic and AI-driven tools: Merge Workflow Orchestrator can help organizations by providing a single unifying cloud-based interface for potentially numerous applications across the organization. This includes many of the newer regulatory-cleared AI-based imaging diagnostic tools that have been introduced in the last few years, as well as the various PACS and other systems mentioned previously.

Dynamic worklist: Most worklists use simple database filtering, periodic polling and manual refresh to produce a spreadsheet view. By contrast, Merge Workflow Orchestrator uses a patented, event-driven worklist with the novel “Go to Next” mode that brings up the next study with a single click, together with relevant patient information alongside the study. It is colorful, eye-catching and easy to navigate with instant updates. No more waiting for polling or refreshing.

AI-driven distribution engine: Built with a proprietary AI technology, Merge Workflow Orchestrator provides an automated distribution engine that “learns” from an organization’s usage patterns over time, how to distribute caseloads equitably across radiologists, automatically and in compliance with business rules.

Imaging process end-to-end: Merge Workflow Orchestrator integrates with systems across every step of the patient’s imaging journey, from the imaging order through to the final results. Now, it is possible for the whole journey of all patients to be tracked and displayed to every role in the patient journey – the referring provider, the radiology department front desk staff, the technologist, the radiologist, the radiology department manager, the PACS administrator, and the leadership in the practice, department, or health system.

In our daily lives, we expect technology to evolve and work for us in useful and interactive ways—not for us to have to adapt to technology’s limitations. We develop affection for, and get satisfaction from, technologies that dependably and reliably increase our capabilities and our confidence. The same should be true in medical
imaging technology--and it is with Merge Workflow Orchestrator.

To learn more, visit Merge Workflow Orchestrator or contact us.