Setting Up Peer Review

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, impartial, and efficient method for conducting peer reviews and forwarding data to the ACR.

The PowerScribe 360 | Reporting system has the flexibility to enable the peer review process at the system level but set different requirements at individual sites. Once you have configured peer review at the site, the system prompts providers to peer-review studies that meet an interval requirement, for example, every 30th CT exam. And, providers can initiate peer review manually from the Explorer or Reporting page.

As administrator, you must set up peer review in the PowerScribe 360 | Reporting Administrator Portal. You determine what type of studies are subject to peer review, whether to include residents in the review process, and at what interval the system presents studies for review. You must also give one or more users the ability to verify peer reviews.

To activate the peer review process, you must configure the system, set up the individuals who will participate in the process, and set up one or more verifiers, that is, persons authorized to monitor peer review and send data to the ACR when appropriate.

To initiate peer review, you will need to make the following changes to system settings:

Configure peer review at the system level.
Designate the type of exams eligible for peer review
Configure the RADPEER settings for your system, using information provided by the ACR
If desired, change the default descriptions for each of the four possible ratings. CAUTION: It is recommended that you not change these descriptions.

To allow providers to perform peer reviews, you will need to:

In the user accounts of radiologists who will conduct peer reviews, configure the RADPEER user identifiers provided by the ACR

In most cases, an administrator or QA chief is authorized to verify peer reviews and send data to the ACR. You will need to:

Grant the appropriate administrative rights to the verifier(s)