IT-Supported Request Management for Clinical Radiology: Analyzing the Radiological Order Workflow through Contextual Interviews

Abstract

Requests for radiological examinations in large medical facilities are a distributed and complex process with potential health-related risks for patients. A user-centered qualitative analysis with contextual interviews uncovered nine core problems, which hinder work efficiency and patient care: (1) Difficulties to access patient data & requests, (2) the large number of phone calls, (3) restricted & abused access rights, (4) request status difficult to track, (5) paper notes used for patient data, (6) lack of assistance for data entry, (7) frustration through documentation, (8) IT-systems not self-explanatory, and (9) conflict between physicians and radiologists. Contextual interviews were found to be a well fitting method to analyze and understand this complex process with multiple user roles. This analysis showed that there is room for improvement in the underlying IT systems, workflows and infrastructure. Our data gave useful insight into solutions to these problems and how we can use technology to improve all aspects of the request management. We are currently addressing those issues with a user-centered design process to design and implement a mobile application, which we will present in future work.