The radiologist will then book a patient appointment, perform the imaging examination, review the images, produce a report, and return either the report or report and images to the referring physician. The exact sequence of operations and the exact information which is communicated between the two parties depends on the particular hospital site being studied. This subset of clinical communication needs requires the use of a subset of the medical record. There is also the starting assumption that communication about medical images is valuable. Whilst this interaction uses a specific subset of the medical record and, in fact, a particular subset of the clinical interactions that will generally be seen, it was felt that this was a valuable area for initial investigation for a variety of reasons.
Radiology tends to have a higher level of infrastructure than many other departments.
Typically, they will at least have a radiology information system, often they will have an electronic booking system and sometimes they will have electronic image availability within the radiology department. In addition, because the radiology department is a service provider, the boundaries of communication are well defined and the expectations on both parties sides are well understood. Investigations of the Communications Slice of an Integrated Clinical Workstation. Although the initial investigation was in the area of radiology, it was intended that the results should allow generalisation into, for instance, operating room and cardiology areas. It was expected from the outset that the ability to select a subset of the medical record, annotate it, and send that to a remote party to enable communication between parties involved in patient healthcare would be useful.