Added Value of Structured Reporting for Medical Practice and Management

Background:

Structured reports are getting popular gradually. To increase the adaptation of the technology, we will briefly go over the benefits that structured reports can provide to almost all medical staff and the medical community in general.

Objectives:

Learning objectives include:

1. What are the benefits of SR for medical doctors?

2. What are the benefits of SR for patients?

3. How can SR boost high quality research?

Outline:

First, I will briefly go over some of the known benefits of SR, as follows:

• Disease and domain-specific report templates can increase the clarity and quality of the report.

• The use of common data elements ensures the consistent use of terminology across practices.

• The use of checklists inherently in structured reports reduces diagnostic errors.

• Less grammatical and nongrammatical errors may be introduced into SR even when digital speech recognition is used.

• Preserving the completeness of report documentation improves insurance and other reimbursements.

• It improves quality.

• It may promote evidence-based medicine by integrating clinical decision support tools with radiology reports.

However, the most important factor is to improve research. Each population based on genetic background and ethnicity may require different or specific medical protocols or practice for certain diseases. High quality medical research is needed to address the differences and to build the foundation for more appropriate medical procedures and knowledge generation. The importance of high impact and high-quality research in medicine and medical practice is felt in Iranian universities but irrespective a large amount of government investments on different aspects of medical fields is not clearly observable. The universities have abundant numbers of erudite and competent researchers but not enough tagged or labeled data are available for high impact publications. Medical doctors in Iran are mainly practitioners. Although research has gained momentum within the last few years, mainstream respected researchers in medicine do not put research in their first priority. Structured reporting, if performed properly, can provide the main feed for quality research since while medical practitioners perform their regular medical practice. Their diagnosis and observations can be used directly as input to data mining and machine learning algorithms and at the same time be used for population studies.