COMRAD VRC

Virtual Reporting Made Simple…

COMRAD is pleased to announce the release of COMRAD VRC – COMRAD’s complete work-flow solution for the Virtual Reporting Centre.

The move to a digital radiology environment and the availability of cost effective, high speed network links is changing radiology in a fundamental way. Today it is more efficient to centralise your radiology reporting centre and have it service a number of medical imaging facilities, not just your own. Keep your most expensive resource, the radiologist, in one location and bring the work to him or her.

Opportunities are plentiful for providing reporting services beyond your own imaging centres.

However work-flow tools for the radiologist to allow efficient processing of these external radiographic studies have not kept pace with the new opportunities. The radiologist’s work life has become very complex having to now operate multiple RIS and PACS with no standard work-flow. Just tracking what work needs to be done can be a nightmare.

COMRAD VRC offers flexible work-flow options that allow you to provide an efficient and cost effective reporting service to many imaging centres regardless of their throughput, location or infrastructure.

COMRAD VRC takes information from disparate systems, checks for validity and completeness and presents it to the radiologist in a single reporting work-list to standardise work-flow.

COMRAD VRC also takes care of other “complex bits”

• No more paper or faxes - the request to report a study is electronic
• Matching the DICOM images to the reporting request is automated.
• View the images from your local PACS or invoke the image viewer directly from the requesting PACS system.
• Delivering the finished result back to the requesting system is electronic.
• Billing the requesting imaging centre for your reading services is automated.

An electronic request for a patient study reading service, initiates the COMRAD VRC process:

• Online request - The external imaging centre completes the online COMRAD VRC request web form via a standard Internet browser. Optionally a paper based patient referral can be scanned and included with the electronic request. The online request form is a good option for low volume or ad-hoc requests.
• COMRAD-to-COMRAD - Where a COMRAD RIS is operated by the requesting imaging centre, the electronic request can be configured to be automatically sent to the COMRAD VRC based on certain rules e.g. to automatically request reading services for all cases after 5pm and over the weekend. Or, our radiologist is away for 2 weeks, send all studies to the VRC for reporting. Alternatively the radiographer can manually request that the VRC read the study on a case by case basis with the click of a button once the images have been acquired.
• 3rd party RIS or HIS-to-COMRAD - COMRAD VRC also has a published 3rd party interface where electronic requests (an HL7 Order) can be sent from other clinical systems.

The COMRAD VRC system queues all reading requests and checks for validity and image availability and match. The ready-to-report patient study then automatically appears on the COMRAD reporting work-list.

Images can be ‘pushed’ to the local COMRAD VRC integrated PACS or stay in their original location. The COMRAD VRC maintains connections to multiple PACS systems. This means it is not necessary to push images from one system to another and may avoid additional PACS fees and complicated networking requirements. Depending on the external PACS capabilities the patient’s clinical history and prior images will also be available for viewing. Currently supported PACS include Intelerad, Cedara, Fuji, Agfa and CDN.

The work-list can be filtered to suit by each radiologist (eg external VRC sites or not) and, as with all parameter columns, they can be added/removed/ordered to suit (eg show site name column or not).

When the radiologist selects a study off the work-list, either the local COMRAD VRC integrated PACS viewer will launch, or the external imaging site’s PACS viewer will launch (depending on the physical location of the study images).

The report is transcribed using Speech Recognition or dictated and typed using the normal COMRAD Digital Dictation work-flow.

Once verified the finished report will automatically be distributed to the original imaging centre, electronically or by fax.

Cases reported can be billed back to the requesting imaging centre at the agreed rates.

Click here to download the pdf of the brochure