Quality Management Software to Quickly Find the Root Cause of X-Ray Scan Errors
Customer
QAISys, Inc. is a US patient safety organization providing health systems with statistical quality analysis of medical images, and consultation services.
Challenge
The Customer needed an image quality management system backed by a datacenter to complement their QAISys (Quality Assessment and Improvement System) product.
QAISys is a data processing solution developed to detect the source of questionable medical image quality. The system serves as the communication bridge among radiologists, technologists and managers who work opposite shifts and in distributed locations.
Solution
The quality management system collects and stores exam records with images. Each record includes the following attributes:
- Accession number
- Date
- Time
- Location (examination room, department, facility)
- Exam type
- Shift and performing technologist
- Personal patient’s information (name, age, gender)
The exam details serve as the basis for tracking and healthcare data analytics. Users (physicians, radiologists) can add a feedback on the image quality (nature and severity of detraction) via the ‘Edit Detractions’ form and input exam results manually if needed.
Depending on the feedback, managers can point out the source of a quality issue:
- Inadequate technologist’s actions
- Patient-related difficulties (for example, the patient moved during the X-ray scanning)
- Equipment limitations or malfunctions
- Process deficiencies
Then, the datacenter processes the collected exam records, feedbacks and quality issue source and compiles a quality rating report (QR). Using the QR, a manager can detect whether a specific source should be investigated and corrected. It can be a modality QR comparison to identify the troublesome location, or a shift QR comparison to detect the lowest-performing shift.
Results
The imaging quality management system and datacenter provide users with organized approaches to collecting and analyzing imaging error data, thus automating the routine aspects of care. The solution is used for health systems’ internal purposes, such as cost reports, statistics and more.
Technologies and Tools
.NET, Crystal Reports, MS Access, MS SQL Server, MS Visual Studio, Web Services, XML
