Radiology interpretation process modeling

Information and communication technology in healthcare promises optimized patient care while ensuring efficiency and cost-effectiveness. However, the promised results are not yet achieved; the healthcare process requires analysis and radical redesign to achieve improvements in care quality and productivity. Healthcare process reengineering is thus necessary and involves modeling its workflow. Even though the healthcare process is very large and not very well modeled yet, its sub-processes can be modeled individually, providing fundamental pieces of the whole model. In this paper, we are interested in modeling the radiology interpretation process that results in generating a diagnostic radiology report. This radiology report is an important clinical element of the patient healthcare record and assists in healthcare decisions. We present the radiology interpretation process by identifying its boundaries and by positioning it on the large healthcare process map. Moreover, we discuss an information data model and identify roles, tasks and several information flows. Furthermore, we describe standard frameworks to enable radiology interpretation workflow implementations between heterogeneous systems.