Medical imaging is as central to patient care as are labs or pathology, and concern for radiation safety is as old as the field itself. These concerns have generated multiple mandates related to dose management. A decade ago, California was the first state to mandate improved radiation dose management, and other states have followed its lead.
Stricter dose management regulations represent a substantial operational burden for health care providers. Dose management systems (DMS) provide much needed support.
We have distilled five imperatives for dose management excellence.
Imperative 1: Data aggregation and processing
All the data required for effective dose management is already available in medical imaging departments, but it’s often not used sufficiently. To perform its intended tasks, a DMS must acquire dosimetry parameters and store them in an easily searchable database. But unless this data is automatically aggregated, dose management is time-consuming and tedious. DMS software remedies these issues by automatically gathering and consolidating the large amounts of dose data generated by imaging modalities.
Imperative 2: Compliance with regulations and best practices
One of the main uses of DMS is to record the dose metrics, assign protocols to corresponding diagnostic reference levels (DRLs), and compare them with the respective thresholds, ensuring compliance with national and local DRLs. To guarantee this compliance, a DMS must be able to fulfill various criteria, including identifying, analyzing, and processing significant dose events and exporting dose data for reporting.
Imperative 3: Visualizations and insights
Data visualization is one of the most powerful ways to gain insights from data and clearly communicate them to others. State-of-the-art DMSs can analyze a complete set of dose data and automatically visualize it. Presenting data in a pictorial or graphical format enables decision makers to grasp complex data quickly and identify patterns. A DMS should be able to display dose charts as timelines, link from any dose parameter to the corresponding image, and report modality load (day, time, and procedure).
Imperative 4: Interoperability with existing IT infrastructure
To seamlessly integrate a DMS in clinical practice, it requires not only an inbound connection to the picture-archiving and communication system of the hospital or the modalities themselves, but also outbound interfaces to third parties, allowing dose information to be transmitted to other IT systems, such as the radiology information system or the hospital information system. To meet these requirements, the DMS needs to be integrated in a central IT infrastructure.
Imperative 5: Enhancements and scalability
A modern DMS must be tailored to each institution’s size and workload. Today, the most flexible DMS products are offered as software as a service (SaaS), deployed via the cloud. This model eliminates the need for local IT infrastructure and related upfront investment, reducing both effort and total cost of ownership. In addition, SaaS allows quicker scalability, continuous upgrades without additional costs, and reliable access to the most recent functionalities.
Next-Generation DMSs
DMSs are necessary tools that make it possible to systematically monitor patient radiation dose and exceedances of dose reference values, thus fulfilling the obligation to report significant dose events to the supervisory authority without delay. Despite significant progress during the past decade, most solutions have failed to address—or even have created—significant challenges.
Teamplay Dose from Siemens Healthineers provides easy access to dose data, supports the quality assurance process for monitoring imaging radiation dosage, and offers additional advantages, including lower infrastructure and maintenance costs and benefits from continuous feature releases.
Learn more about dose management and teamplay Dose.