A city-wide integrated Radiology and Nuclear Medicine peer review pilot project has been announced at the integrated department of diagnostic services at Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) and St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton (SJHH) in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
The pilot project seeks to implement a quality assurance, improvement and collaboration programme for radiology and nuclear medicine/molecular imaging across three of HHS’s campuses and at SJHH. The pilot aims to be fully automated, actionable, and well-adopted among participating physicians.
HHS and SJHH are affiliated with McMaster University’s Faculty of Health Sciences (McMaster). Together, they serve a population of over 2.3 million across 9 campuses, and have over 60 highly specialised radiologists and nuclear medicine physicians.
HHS and SJHH will be using Real Time Medical’s context-aware peer review software platform, DiaShare™ QUALITY, in support of pilot project objectives.
Dr. Naveen Parasu, Staff Radiologist and Departmental Quality Assurance Coordinator at the Juravinski Hospital and Cancer Centre, and Associate Professor at McMaster, said: "We were looking for a solution that would automate existing and new QA workflows, and integrate them seamlessly into our regular reporting workflows out of our GE PACS. We also wanted a single view of our QA activities across all of our campuses. Finally, of equal importance were analytics that allow us to take action to meaningfully improve the quality of care we deliver.”
“Our ultimate goal is to establish a city-wide Diagnostic Services physician quality assurance program that will contribute to and improve the quality of Hamilton’s medical and molecular imaging services. Both organisations have embraced a culture of patient safety and continuous quality improvement; we see this QA pilot as the next step in our quality journey”, said David Wormald, Integrated Assistant Vice President Diagnostic Services and Medical Diagnostic Unit.
Ian Maynard, CEO and Co-Founder of Real Time Medical, added, "Our quality assurance, improvement and collaboration platform significantly improves upon traditional approaches to peer review, which are typically punitive, non-anonymised and not integrated into radiologists’ normal workflow and diagnostic systems. When done correctly, quality assurance can be made a seamless aspect of normal workflow, to the benefit of the organisations involved, the physicians and the patients they serve. I am confident HHS and SJHH will see tremendous results with our innovative platform in support of their commitment to continuous quality improvement."
