Results Distribution
Summary
The IHE Result Distribution Profile (RD) defines the communication of imaging results like radiology reports between Report Creators, Managers, and Consumers.
Benefits
The RD Profile provides key data in a structured format to trigger downstream activities like
- Follow up of non-critical actionable findings
- Additional billing
- Consults
- Submission to registries/analysis
- Submission for inquiries to clinical trials
- Business analysis
RD is a gap solution to bridge result communication until structured formats like CDA and SDC are more widely supported. It is designed to maximize communication between a wide variety of existing systems
Details
The Report Distribution profile facicitlates communication of imaging results (i.e., radiology reports) between physicians, medical staff, and various facilities. It provides a consistent mechanism, and definition of metadata, to simplify the distribution of imaging results. When a radiologist creates an interpretation, or a “result”, of an imaging study, the imaging result is often sent to an EMR for review by the physician who ordered the study. These imaging results are used to determine the on-going care, or “clinical care pathway”, for the patient. Additionally, radiologists often use prior (comparison study) imaging results in the interpretation of a new imaging procedure. Imaging results may also be used for data mining for public health studies or clinical trial evaluations.
Use cases addressed by this profile include:
- Send an imaging result to an EMR
- Send an imaging result to a Follow-Up Source (i.e., Non-Critical Actionable Findings)
The profile is using an HL7 2.5.1 Observation Results (ORU) message to maximize compatibility with existing installed systems.
Systems Affected
Report Creators like
- Voice dictation system
- Point and click reporting solutions
- Natural language processing systems
- Template driven or text driven reporting solutions in Radiology or cardiology, etc
Report Managers like
- Reporting systems
- PACS system
- EMR
Report Consumers like
- Report Viewers
- EMRs
- Research databases
- Regulatory registries (e.g. ACC NCDR)
- Follow-up Actionable Finding Mgr
Actors & Transactions:
Specification
Profile Status: Trial Implementation
Documents:
Underlying Standards:
- HL7 Version 2.5.1