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.

Attend the RSNA Industry Forum on Radiology Reporting

The RSNA Reporting Committee is sponsoring a forum for physicians and industry executives at RSNA Headquarters. The purpose of the meeting is to share the technical framework and standards efforts that RSNA has developed, to engage the clinical community in the improvement and adoption of standardized report templates, and to give the vendors an opportunity to interact with the individuals creating related standards and information models. The meeting is open and attendance is free of charge, registration is required.

The agenda includes a progress report on the RSNA reporting initiative, a panel of vendors who provide radiology reporting systems, an interactive discussion of efforts to include the clinical utility of template libraries, and a review of standardized reporting efforts being conducted by pathology, oncology, and cardiology.

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.

Stay Informed: Join the RSNA Reporting Forum Mailing List

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.