DOI 10.1007/s00330-008-1098-3 COMPUTER APPLICATIONS Petter Hurlen

Do clinicians read our reports? Integrating the radiology information system with the electronic patient record: experiences from the first 2 years Abstract This study aimed to deter-mine how clinicians adapted to and utilized new routines for accessing radiology reports after the integration of an electronic patient record (EPR) with a radiology information system (RIS). Activity-related data describing the availability and receipt of radiology reports were collected from the EPR and the RIS over a period of 2 years. Twelve percent of the final radiology reports had not been opened 4 weeks after they had been entered into the EPR. For opened reports, the median time after a report was available in the EPR until it was first opened by a clinician was less than 1 h for pre-liminary reports and less than 4 h for final radiology reports. The use of radiology reports was stable during the second observation year. Some reports were not opened for professional as well as technical reasons. The inte-grated information systems offered a potential for improving routines related to the transmission of radiology re-ports. Clinicians did not fully take advantage of this potential in the 2 years after its introduction