RSNA Radiology Reporting Initiative

The RSNA has established a Radiology Reporting Committee to identify and promote "best practices" in radiology reporting. The Committee, part of the Radiology Informatics Committee, includes radiologists and imaging informatics experts. The Reporting Committee is closely linked to RSNA's Quality Improvement Committee and RadLex® Steering Committee.

Download the New Radiology Report Templates

The RSNA Reporting Committee is pleased to announce the availability of over 100 best-practices radiology report templates. We hope you will take the time to download and review these templates for use in your practice, and to encourage your colleagues to do the same.

Important Announcement: RSNA Reporting Forum Face to Face Meeting in 2011

The RSNA Reporting committee will hold its second Reporting Forum in 2011. The forum is intended to bring together radiologists and other imaging professionals, reporting vendors, standards experts, and others interested in improving radiology communication. The goal of the forum is to foster the adoption of best-practices reporting methods in radiology and other imaging specialties. To stay informed about plans for this upcoming meeting, join the RSNA Reporting Forum email list.

Stay Informed: Join the RSNA Reporting Forum

If you are interested in receiving periodic updates on the activities of the RSNA Reporting initiative, please join the RSNA Reporting Forum.

Background

• RSNA Reporting Committee Plan

• Towards best practices in radiology reporting, a committee position paper

• 2008 Health policy statement on structured reporting in cardiovascular imaging

• The radiology report of the future: A summary of the 2007 Intersociety Conference

• Structured reporting: Patient care enhancement or productivity nightmare?

• A randomized trial to evaluate an early structured reporting system and an accompanying editorial

• A review of the history of BI-RADS(TM) structured reporting and an accompanying editorial

• A brief article in the Quantitative Imaging Biomarkers Alliance (QIBA) Quarterly newsletter

Progress

• June 2008: RSNA convened a workshop to plan the future of radiology reporting. More than 50 radiologists, medical informatics specialists, and representatives of cardiology, oncology, and pathology participated. Consensus was reached on a global template for diagnostic radiology reports, including standardized radiology report headings.

• November 2008: In conjunction with the RSNA Quality Improvement Committee, developed a standardized template for documenting communication of critical test results.

• March 2009: Formed 13 subcommittees to create templates for specific clinical areas in collaboration with subspecialty professional organizations.

• May 2009: Conducted an industry forum for radiology reporting vendors, attended by 20 vendor representatives. Slide presentations from that meeting are available.

• December 2009: Released the first set of reporting templates, freely available for downloading and use.

• October 2010: A proposal to develop a template exchange profile was approved by the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE). This profile will enable radiologists to download templates from a template library directly into their favorite reporting system. It also will facilitate the vendor independent migration of templates between reporting systems.

• November 2010: RSNA announces the availability of over 100 best-practices radiology report templates, in a beta version of a new searchable report template database.

Information for Reporting Template Developers

The information below is presented to aid radiologists and others who are developing reporting templates.

• Template Development Subcommittees

• Standard Radiology Report Headings -- These headings outline the major sections of a generic radiology report.

• Report template guidelines -- This page describes the "mark-up language" to be used to describe reporting templates.

• Example reporting template -- Lung nodule CT exam.

Technical Resources

• RSNA RadLex radiology vocabulary. Terms in reporting templates will be mapped to RadLex and other controlled vocabularies.

• Synoptic Reporting code site. The College of American Pathologists offers their "Electronic Cancer Checklists" (eCC) using the RELAX-NG language for XML documents.

• HL7 Clinical Document Architecture.

• Reporting template metadata. These data are used to index entries in the library of reporting templates.

References

We are constructing a bibliography of structured reporting in radiology.