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NOTE: Peer Review is a purchasable feature. Contact your Nuance sales representative for more information. |
To be accredited by the ACR (American College of Radiology), a facility must have a peer review process in place. Peer review is often a cumbersome, error-prone process, involving a paper-based work flow or requiring reviewers to log in and out of the ACR’s web-based application for each review. The peer review feature in PowerScribe 360 | Reporting replaces these procedures with an orderly and efficient method for conducting peer reviews and forwarding data to the ACR.
As administrator, you must set up peer review in the PowerScribe 360 | Reporting Administrator Portal. You determine what modalities are subject to peer review, whether to include residents in the review process, and at what interval the studies are presented for review.
In the PowerScribe 360 | Reporting client application, each provider is prompted to review another provider’s work after having read a specified number of exams for a particular modality. The provider can cancel the peer review assignment only if authorized to do so. This automated process provides an impartial way of distributing peer review assignments. The provider can also initiate a peer review manually, either from the Explorer screen or from the Reporting screen.
On reviewing a study, the provider assigns it a rating from one to four, with one or two signifying that the reviewer concurs with the prior interpretation, and three or four indicating that the reviewer does not concur. All reviews with ratings of three or four require the reviewing providers to describe the reason for not concurring.
The ACR has introduced a further breakdown of ratings into 1, 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, 4a, and 4b, with the ‘a’ suffix meaning “Unlikely to be clinically significant” and the ‘b’ suffix meaning “Likely to be clinically significant.”
Reviews with ratings of three and four require verification by the department’s QA chief or another authorized verifier. The verifier uses a Pending Reviews link to see a list of all unverified reviews rated three or four. For each of these, the verifier enters a comment; the review is then removed from the Pending list and added to the administrator’s Recent Verifications list. Any reviews can be sent to the ACR, if your facility is equipped to use the eRADPEER™ service.
In the PowerScribe 360 | Reporting Administrator Portal, you can search for peer reviews meeting various criteria, such as those with a specific numeric rating or those in the ‘concur’ or ‘not concur’ category. You can manually select a review for automated forwarding to the ACR, and you can export any review, or set of reviews, to an .xml file. When you export to .xml, the system generates a spreadsheet with the accession number, name, procedure, rating, and review comment. If authorized to do so, you can also run a Peer Review database report to monitor peer review activity.
Click here for more information on peer review.