Mammographers are often overburdened and overworked, so anything to ease the pressure is a boon. The mammography reporting systems from PenRad, Atirix, MagView, and Mammography Reporting Systems all seek to increase efficiency and streamline workflow for radiologists.
When Congress enacted the Mammography Quality Standards Act of 1992, it charged the FDA with supervising and inspecting facilities that perform mammograms. The act requires that written reports be issued in a timely fashion and that the facility keep a patient's medical record on hand for five or 10 years, depending on whether the radiologist will continue seeing the patient.
That's a lot of extra paperwork for the radiologist and also a lot of patient tracking. The need to corral that information became an opportunity for firms to begin developing mammography reporting systems to help practices comply with the FDA's mandates.
“It's gotten to the point where I can't run a practice without it,” said Terry Macarol, program manager for Advocate Health Care in Oak Brook, IL.
Macarol uses PenRad's product to help run nine hospitals and 24 breast imaging sites. She said maybe small practices could function without a mammography reporting system, but not the large ones.
“There's no way to keep your eye in a good timely manner on everything—quality matters, three-call rate, patients who are BI-RADS zero,” she said.
The companies and some of their users say the systems save time and money because they track patients and take care of clerical necessities electronically. Breast imaging centers have to send a letter to every patient regarding every mammography procedure, for instance. In the past, someone would have to print out the letter, photocopy it, put the patient's name on it, verify the address, and mail it. With a mammography reporting system, that's all taken care of automatically, meaning the radiologist does minimal clerical work.
Like the other systems, the product from Mammography Reporting Systems interfaces with a variety of digitized voice recognition products, coordinates images with patient records, and has quick dragand- drop findings tools and templates, according to the company's CEO, Mark Morris.
