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TRIP™ Workflow Project & Nomenclature

TRIP™ (Transforming the Radiological Interpretation Process) is a SIIM initiative to spearhead research, education, and discovery of innovative solutions to the problems facing the imaging informatics community today. TRIP™ focuses on three fundamental objectives: 1) improving efficiency of interpretation of large data sets,  2) improving the timeliness and effectiveness of communication, and 3) decreasing medical errors; all to achieve the ultimate goal to improve the quality and safety of patient care.

The latest SIIM TRIP™ project is defining an imaging workflow lexicon so the standardized terms can be used to compare imaging practices, improve efficiencies, and foster the development of best practices. The  workflow definitions and key performance indicators will have major implications for imaging departments, regulatory initiatives and industry. The work of this committee creates a standard methodology to define and track such things as patient waiting times, report turnaround times, and technolgists and radiologists efficiency.

There has been great participation by the imaging community including several SIIM TRIP™ Corporate Members (Agfa Healthcare,  Carestream, GE Healthcare, Siemens, Toshiba) who are at the forefront, working together with researchers and providers to develop the processes and dashboards to improve provider performance and enhance quality patient care.

At the SIIM 2011 Annual Meeting on June 4, a team from the University of Maryland, Mayo Clinic, Agfa Healthcare, and GE Healthcare presented a the TRIP vendor-neutral business analytics demonstration.

The demo successfully met the goal of showing the benefits of an industry standard specification for medical imaging metrics with multiple different vendor/open source BI dashboards connected to specification conforming radiology information systems. Presentation of the radiology workflow metrics differed, but the data meaning was the same, therefore comparable across organizations.

The steps taken to develop this demo were to:

• Develop a research database of workflow events simulating an imaging department
• Define web services to access the information
• Create interoperatble dashboards that show access to information using the web services

Pull down data from the TRIP cloud-based dataset and use your own anaytics tools to explore key performance indicators and workflow events from the research database.

Let us hear from you. If you are interested in participating in the TRIP workflow, please send us an e-mail. You can also share your experience and comments on the new SIIMshare blog.

  In this video, (2:43 minutes) Dr. Brad Erickson,
Chair of the TRIP Subcommittee, summarizes
the progress  made at the first meeting of the
TRIP workflow working group and announces a
 name contest for the project.Send suggestions
to trip@siimweb.org.

TRIP Workflow Normalized Names - DRAFTSeptember 2011

SIIM TRIP Workflow Initiative Backgrounder (PDF)

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To learn more about the history of the SIIM TRIP™ Initiative go to the (2004-2007) TRIP™ Website.  A TRIP™ conference along with several forums and white papers were developed between 2004-2007 that raised awareness and support for TRIP™ research and educational activities by bringing the best of industry, government, and academia together to interact and share results.