CHICAGO--Radiology has eliminated physical limitations for health IT, said Chris Sistrom, MD, MPH, vice chair and associate professor of the department of radiology at University of Florida during a Sunday scientific session at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) meeting.

Decision support systems benefit from the health IT boom, and emerging decision support tools utilize a comprehensive array of patient data to better inform decision making and enable evidence-based radiology.

Evidence-based radiology is evolving, said Sistrom, who argued that emerging decision-support tools interact with the radiologist’s personal experience and knowledge of the patient’s clinical history and prior imaging studies to make better use of evidence.

Data such as on-demand access to aggregate statistics, prior imaging and filtered views of the patient’s history enable new decision support models, Sistrom said.

He shared four examples of ubiquitous decision support tools, such as:

• LEXIMER (lexicon-mediated entropy reduction) automatically analyzes unstructured radiology reports and extracts coded data about clinically significant findings and recommendations to create statistics and inform decision making.

• IBIS (imaging business intelligence system) provides information about the intensity and quality of studies ordered by physicians to help decision-makers identify which physicians to target for remediation and ultimately reduce the number of inappropriate imaging studies.

• QPID (queriable patient inference dossier) is a semantic search engine designed for medical records searching. QPID warns the ordering physician when a duplicate exam is ordered.

• Render is an online searchable radiology repository that uses HL7 links and PACS file transfers to provide a Google-like search capability. Radiologists can use the free text report and image search application to find relevant cases.