Charles E. Kahn MD, MS, Presenter: Shareholder, Hotlight Inc Officer, Hotlight Inc

Harry Solomon, Abstract Co-Author: Employee, General Electric Company

Kevin O'Donnell, Abstract Co-Author: Employee, Toshiba Corporation

Curtis P. Langlotz MD, PhD, Abstract Co-Author: Shareholder, Montage Healthcare Solutions, Inc Advisory Board, General Electric Company Advisory Board, Reed Elsevier Advisory Board, MedNetworks, Inc Spouse, Consultant, Amgen Inc Spouse, Consultant, Novartis AG Spouse, Consultant, Johnson and Johnson

The IHE and DICOM standards bodies provide important venues to develop standards needed to bring template-based radiology reporting into clinical practice.

The RSNA and other radiology organizations have embarked on an effort to develop templates for reporting medical imaging procedures.  To promote the use of template-based reporting, the RSNA Reporting Committee has worked in concert with a variety of medical professional societies and medical information system producers to establish a set of international standards for radiology reporting. 

The standards development efforts have been coordinated with the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE; www.ihe.net) and Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) standards bodies.  IHE develops integration profiles that describe how to apply existing standards to help systems work together.  The IHE Radiology group is developing the Management of Radiology Report Templates (MRRT) integration profile to support mechanisms for templates to be queried by, pulled from, or pushed to relevant information systems.  The MRRT profile will enable transfer of templates between reporting systems and foster the use of standard templates from template libraries created by radiology practices, professional organizations, and vendors. DICOM Working Group 8 (Structured Reporting) has undertaken development of an implementation guide to describe the transformation of reports from RSNA's report template format into documents that comply with the Health Level Seven (HL7) Clinical Document Architecture, which is the international standard for clinical reports. 

The IHE and DICOM reporting standards efforts involve physicians, informatics professionals, and engineers.  In addition to radiologists, these efforts have seen participation from pathology, ophthalmology, and veterinary medicine, and from developers of commercial reporting systems.  International standards efforts provide a mechanism to engage corporate participation, which is essential to widespread dissemination of the technology.  This presentation will review and update the progress in these standards development efforts.

Kahn, C, Solomon, H, O'Donnell, K, Langlotz, C, Developing International Standards to Support Structured Reporting in Radiology.  Radiological Society of North America 2011 Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting, November 26 - December 2, 2011 ,Chicago IL. http://archive.rsna.org/2011/11009990.html