Version 2.0 of Softek Illuminate (Illuminate), with its proprietary free-text search technology, gives Philips iSite PACS users split-second access to all radiology reports and images in their system.
Illuminate can be accessed either through the iSite menu on the radiologist’s workstation or from QuickLink icons right within the iSite exam shelf. The QuickLink icons allow doctors to search for past reports without interrupting their current workflow.
From the Illuminate search screen, users simply type in the word or words in the studies they want to find. Advanced functions allow searches to be as broad or narrow as users desire. Illuminate’s patent-pending crawler algorithm, which gathers and indexes all the text stored on iSite, assures that a listing of all corresponding reports will typically appear in less than a second. In addition, a Relevance Algorithm ranks the results so that the most relevant positive notations appear first.
Illuminate’s instantaneous data-mining ability is designed to benefit everyone involved with the radiology suite, saving time and money and, ultimately, improving patient care.
Users have numerous capabilities for searching, saving and sharing information, including hyperLinks, auto-complete, users can tag, categorize and easily retrieve cases for a variety of reasons, set up an Alert to notify when a follow-up study is entered for a particular patient. And a built-in Peer Review eliminates the need for a costly separate system to generate reports necessary for ACR accreditation. The additional benefit of Illuminate’s integrated review capability is that radiologists can perform and document peer reviews as they are reading studies in the course of their daily work.
Some of its functions include:
∑ Illuminate’s tagging and alerting capabilities encourage greater collaboration among physicians and allow radiologists to more easily follow up with clinicians on patient outcomes, thereby strengthening the relationship between clinicians and radiologists.
∑ Radiologists can be alerted automatically when a patient receives the follow-up procedure that they have recommended. Doctors are then able to track the results and understand the outcomes of their recommendations.
∑ Radiologists desiring to compare a current reading with a previous one can type in the appropriate clinical key word and instantly locate and review that earlier study, decreasing the time it takes in certain cases to make an accurate diagnosis.
∑ Educators – or any radiologist putting together a presentation – will save hours, or even weeks, locating the cases they need to reference.
∑ Researchers can compare findings of previously unlinked studies to support a hypothesis, confirm a trend or possibly identify new curative measures.
∑ Hospital administrators can use Illuminate to create reports and track cases for government filings and maximum insurance reimbursements and to analyze radiology trends at their facilities.