SAR 2016 Conference Attendees Experience the Future of Radiology

Clinicians from Cleveland Clinic and UC San Francisco Discuss Using Enterprise Viewer at Annual Gathering

The impact of cross-platform and mobile access to patient images is changing the workflow of radiologists, including their professional conferences and continuing medical education (CME). At the Society of Abdominal Radiology (SAR) 2016 annual meeting, BYOD support for accessing patient images played a significant role in the individual experience of participants. The conference’s “Small Bowel Imaging Hands-On Workshop” and Case of the Day program allowed attendees to experience how enterprise image access from laptops, smartphones and tablets will transform both their training and their day-to-day workflow.

CME with BYOD
Hands-on continuing medical education (CME) sessions at radiology conferences have traditionally required complex on-site installation. To recreate a radiology work environment, the SAR Annual Meeting has worked with vendors that ship workstations and servers pre-loaded with instructors’ images, along with technical support personnel to set it all up, directly to the conference site. However, these workstation set-ups are typically only provided for one hands-on workshop, limiting the ability of the conference to cost-effectively offer hands-on CME.

For the past four years, SAR and Calgary Scientific have been working together to improve this system by delivering high-quality, hands-on CME using standard servers and attendees own laptops. For four years, “Small Bowel Imaging Hands-On Workshop” attendees have been able to use ResolutionMD® on their own laptops to view and interact with complete image data sets.

In contrast to using high-end workstations to recreate a radiologist’s work environment, the technology used to run the workshop was a single server loaded with ResolutionMD® and the studies submitted by the Crohn’s Disease Disease-Focused Panel and organized by Dr. Mark Baker of Cleveland Clinic’s Imaging, Digestive Diseases and Surgery Institute. Using a simple link to the server, attendees were able to view, interpret and diagnose patient images in the same way they would in a hospital or other clinical setting.

“This is how we work every day and this is the future of radiology education,” commented Dr. Baker. “No one reads images one at a time when they are at work. We can’t educate effectively without this kind of system.”

Instead of sitting watching a powerpoint presentation with a single images, which is how many medical conference education sessions are conducted, workshop attendees are able to view entire studies from their laptops.

“Getting information from a full data set while experts are available to provide input is far more effective way to learn than sitting in a lecture,” continues Dr. Baker.

“The Small Bowel workshop has been quite successful for teaching the newest techniques and imaging technologies to participants,” comments Dr. Judy Yee, professor of radiology at UCSF School of Medicine and SAR president who presided over the meeting. “There is increasing interest among the annual conference faculty in adopting ResolutionMD® for their workshops. This is definitely a more seamless way to offer attendees enhanced learning experiences.”

Mobile Access to Conference Case of the Day Increases by 81%
This same convenience was extended to the conference’s Case of the Day program. For the third year, attendees were able to access the Case of the Day from their smartphone or tablet. This year the number of attendees that took advantage of mobile access to the Case of the Day increased by an impressive 81 percent.

This growth was due in part to the fact that SAR did away with printed materials for the conference and provided all conference information online instead. The schedule and other meeting details included a link to the Case of the Day. Conference attendees could access the complete Case of the Day image study using their tablets or smartphones from anywhere at anytime. In addition to an increase in overall numbers of mobile users, visits to the Case of the Day site increased by 35 percent.

“Since they all have their device with them, attendees can use 15 minutes of downtime between sessions to view cases,” explained Dr. Yee. “This is still a novel experience for a lot of people but they were able to learn the app quickly because they were already familiar with their device. I saw a lot of people viewing cases on their iPads at breakfast and during breaks throughout the day.”

This blog originally appeared on Calgary Scientific’s website.