PrelimCheck

PrelimCheck is a Windows program to facilitate follow-up of preliminary notes placed in the Synapse PACS.

Radiology residents who take call routinely place preliminary notes into the PACS describing their findings and impressions for cases that they review. However, because of the volume of cases reviewed during a call shift, it is often difficult to follow up on the final attending reads on all of these cases. This program is designed to facilitate follow-up of preliminary notes as a routine educational post-call activity.

Instructions

1. Select the start time and the duration (in hours) of the call shift.
2. Select the location:
   • County - must be on-site at LACUSC.
   • Keck/Norris, select local if on-site at Keck or Norris, otherwise select remote.
3. Click Download. This may take a minute. PrelimCheck will search for notes created in the time interval, and retrieve the corresponding chain of notes and reports.
4. Click any row of the table and the notes appear on the left panel, and the report (if available) on the right panel. If the report contains an impression, the report pane will automatically scroll to the impression. Use up and down arrow keys or page-up/page-down to scroll through the studies. The study data can be sorted by any column by clicking on the column header.
5. Enter text to search notes/reports into the Filter Text field. Multiple search terms can be separated by spaces, and phrases can be searched by entering them within quotes. For instance, the search phrase p111999 “appendiceal rupture” will display rows whose notes or reports contain both p111999 and the phrase appendiceal rupture. Note that phrase searches will not detect phrases split across two lines of a report.
6. Click Save to save the currently displayed table as a CSV file which can be reloaded into PrelimCheck (select Open) or loaded into spreadsheet software such as Excel. Patient names are not saved.

This project was presented at the RSNA 2013 Annual Meeting:

Cheng PM. PrelimCheck: Software to Facilitate Follow-Up of Resident Preliminary Reports. 99th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), Dec. 2013. (Winner of Cum Laude Award).

For source code, go to the GitHub repository.